


Nebuchadnezzar's Dream

by Vinelle



Category: Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Adultery, As In Carlisle Realizes Too Late The Most Recent Cullen Backstory Is A Lot Darker Than Intended, Betrayal, Body Horror, Canon - Book, Canon Compliant, Canon Continuation, Character Death, Children of The Moon, Death, Dismemberment, Existential Crisis, Friendship/Love, Gifted Carlisle Cullen, Graphic Violence, Horror, Humor, Implied/Referenced Sexual Abuse, M/M, Murder, Past Relationship(s), Post-Breaking Dawn, Referenced suicide, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:34:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 60,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28207647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vinelle/pseuds/Vinelle
Summary: "Your colleagues at the hospital are getting suspicious," Alice told Carlisle a week before the world ended. "You’re going to have to do something about that."
Relationships: Aro & Carlisle Cullen, Aro & Renata (Twilight), Aro/Carlisle Cullen
Comments: 117
Kudos: 107





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you read my most recent offering to the internet, bear in mind that it would be a lot less legible without my wonderful and ever gracious beta, one The Carnivorous Muffin. Praise be to her!

_The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II once had a dream._

_There was a statue that was gold on top, then silver, then copper, then iron, then clay and iron. As he watched, a rock struck its feet, and soon the whole statue crumbled, leaving nothing but rubble. The rock then grew into a great mountain that covered all the world._

_This, the prophet Daniel told the king, was a message from Jehovah._

_The statue represented five great human empires, the golden head being the Babylonian Empire, and the following three being those who would come after. The last would be both iron and clay, a divided kingdom. It will fall, and then the kingdom of Heaven will come, crushing those empires in its path._

_Thousands of years later, in 1453, the Byzantine Empire fell. The last of the Roman Empire, a divided kingdom, had fallen._

_The Christian world trembled, because reckoning was surely near. With the fall of this last, great, human empire, all the world would fall to rubble._

* * *

«D’seat taken?» slurred Doctor Milton as she plopped down on the couch next to Carlisle. She sat a little too close.

She smiled up at him. «Hi,» she said.

Having drunk a little too much, her head tilted against his arm as her eyes fluttered shut. Her head slumped, then started upright, then descended again and her heart slowed until she appeared to fall asleep on the spot.

Over the stereo, «Driving Home for Christmas» was playing for the third time that night.

Carlisle sighed.

Alice had pulled him aside a week earlier, and told him that his colleagues were starting to sense something off about him. He was a little too aloof and perfect to feel like a real person to them, and they were starting to suspect. She’d advised him to go join them on their annual Christmas trip to Whitefish, Montana, where cardiologist Dr. Brewer had a cabin. Carlisle could spend the weekend blending in, complaining about Republicans, and getting fake tipsy.

His attempts at pointing out that this was a work trip only nominally, in reality the people who went had known each other for years and acting skills aside, he was very much a vampire, he would stand out more than ever, fell on deaf ears.

«There’s nothing more human than awkwardly imposing yourself,» Alice had chirped.

And so here he was, trying to seem as human as possible, and probably overcompensating. His earlier moment of enthusiastically assuring the others that he enjoyed food, a lot, so much, came back to him. He was glad Emmet hadn’t been there to see that.

Under the guise of getting himself a new drink, Carlisle shimmied away from Milton, and flitted across the room to stand with some other and preferably male colleagues.

Doctor Mehdi waved brightly at him, and handed Carlisle a glass of wine.

After an awkward moment of hoping he could just hold on to it while making conversation, Carlisle realized Dr. Mehdi was expecting him to drink it. He put it to his lips, and kept from visibly cringing as the vile liquid went down his throat. He swallowed a few extra times to make his venom dissolve the residue, but it did little to dispel the repugnant aftertaste.

Blending in used to be so much less effort.

Before the internet, before there was a family of seven vampires trying to pass as high schoolers, there was Carlisle showing up at a hospital with his charm and credentials. He had always been the odd one out, but never had people assumed much worse than eccentricity. The worst he’d had was when a hospital came to believe his insomnia and unlimited energy were the result of a severe cocaine habit. However, that had been during the 80’s, so that had actually helped Carlisle appear human.

Even as his family grew, blending in had never been too much of a problem. He wouldn’t have been able to continue living with humans if it was. No, the problem had been mistakes on his family’s end, not the humans catching on.

And the humans who noticed something off had noticed this in his children, it had never been Carlisle who fell out of step with the humans.

Alice’s warning, however…

He looked at the crowd surrounding him, wondering who had noticed. He still didn’t know how he’d slipped. He had always tried to be unnoticed, or as unnoticed as a person with his looks and skill could be, and he had somehow succeeded. After the initial stir each time he arrived someplace new, people would grow used to him and he’d become a steady, distant fixture at the hospital until he left.

It troubled him, not knowing what had gone wrong this time. In this time of Google and viral videos, secrecy was a more delicate matter than ever. Was it the size of the family? Nine people were beyond pushing it. But no one had volunteered to not exist, and Carlisle couldn’t very well say, «Rose, go live in the woods for ten years.»

Carlisle bravely poured himself another glass of wine, hoping this would help with the human charade.

Two years since they finally moved, yet he missed Forks already.

«So,» Dr. Mehdi said, a bit awkwardly, and smiled again.

Carlisle smiled back, feeling just as awkward. «I heard your family likes skiing.»

«I hear your family likes skiing too.» Dr. Mehdi replied.

Carlisle nodded. «We do,» he said. «We like skiing.»

Dr. Mehdi nodded.

A full minute went by, and Dr. Mehdi and Carlisle both nodded at each other again. «Good talk,» Carlisle said, backing away as Dr. Mehdi went to stand next to the people seated around the salon table, even though there were no chairs available.

Carlisle leaned back against the wall in the far end of the room. Perhaps he should have stayed with Dr. Milton. Or perhaps he should go to fake sleep. The sooner he did that, however, the sooner he’d have to fake wake up.

«Last Christmas» came on. It was the second time that night.

Carlisle shut his eyes, and tried to fill his mind with Rosalie and Edward’s piano duets instead. Those were rare, but all the more precious for it.

It didn’t work.

Funny, how he could be nearly four hundred years old, yet having to spend another two full days blending in with humans was such a daunting task.

He felt a rush of sympathy for his children, who had to endure human high school for years at a time. He played at humanity too, at his work, but he was rewarded with getting to do the work he loved. His children were rewarded with English 101.

Briefly, he entertained the image of himself weeping like a military wife each morning his children went off to school from now on.

There were footsteps outside, he noted absently. He recognized the breathing as that of Dr. Wayne, probably fetching more wood. Carlisle wished he had volunteered for that.

He then heard the strangest sound from outside.

Something heavy, yet scuttering, like a rat the weight of a car. It was faster than anything human yet whatever it was, it had a heartbeat. It was rushing across the snow towards the cabin.

Carlisle threw a look at the humans in the room. They hadn’t heard anything. No one was looking at him, and he was obscured by the darkness in the room.

Within the blink of an eye, Carlisle had moved across the room and out the door. He closed it soundlessly behind him.

The sound was definitely something running, he knew now, and it was only about a hundred yards away.

Dr. Wayne looked up from the stack of wood he was carrying. «Cullen?» he frowned at Carlisle, before turning his head towards the sound of the creature that had finally reached his ears.

Carlisle knew what was going to happen in the nanosecond before it did.

The creature erupted from the woods with volcanic force, fast and furious. It was on Dr. Wayne before the man’s human senses could register it or Carlisle could stop it. Carlisle could only listen as the momentum of their fall crushed the man’s bones into thousands of ruined pieces, each snap like a thousand marbles spilling on the floor.

Blood colored the snow like water color on a canvas, spreading outwards beneath Dr. Wayne as a grim snow angel while the monster devoured him.

The beast buried its snout Dr. Wayne’s chest, and consumed the man’s flesh in greedy, slurping, bites.

Carlisle caught a glimpse of its eyes.

They were brown, almond-shaped, they would have looked human if it wasn’t for the look in them.

Or rather, the look that wasn’t in them.

There was no intelligence, no thought, not even emotion in those eyes. They were empty, dispassionate orbs, their only purpose ocular.

For the first time, Carlisle could believe that there was such a thing as a soulless creature.

This, Carlisle knew with that same certainty he’d known the moment he woke up a vampire, was a werewolf.

Stronger than any vampire, faster, larger, and nearly as hard to kill. Carlisle had heard the stories, but it wasn’t until this moment, staring in mute horror as its disturbingly humanoid, yet furry arms tore at Dr. Wayne’s limp body, that Carlisle understood what a Child of the Moon was and why the Volturi feared them.

It shredded Dr. Wayne’s flesh between dexterous fingers, it greedily scooping the spilt blood back towards the body where it could lap it up.

They were extinct, but the kind of extinct where everyone knew someone who’d seen one. But the stories Carlisle heard were always from the far corners of the world, the Saharas, the Siberian grasslands, the icy planes of the North and South pole. They did not show up in Whitefish, Montana, to eat Carlisle’s colleagues.

This shouldn’t be happening, but somehow it was.

Distantly, watching the gruesome tableau in frozen horror, Carlisle wondered how Caius could ever have mistaken the Quileute shapeshifters for a demon such as this.

Carlisle knew what would happen next. Dr. Wayne wouldn’t be enough. When the beast was done with him, it would turn its attention towards the cabin, filled with living, delicious, humans.

He’d bet that was why it was at this cabin in the first place. It must have smelled the humans, and followed the scent in anticipation of a feast.

The werewolf moved on to Dr. Wayne’s face.

Barely a moment had passed since the werewolf came out of the woods, a few seconds ago Dr. Wayne was still alive. In another few seconds it would finish up with Dr. Wayne and unleash itself upon the unknowing humans inside.

The decision was made before Carlisle could think about it.

He launched himself at the wolf, catapulting them both off Dr. Wayne. Carlisle bit into the base of its skull, aiming for the spine. He hit his mark, his teeth carving a path through the bone as he bit down. The blood tasted surprisingly succulent, the surprise almost distracting him from his purpose. The wolf snarled in fury, twisting its head and winding its arms backwards to grasp at Carlisle, its meal forgotten. Carlisle withdrew a moment later with a chunk of the beast’s spine in his mouth, the lower half of his face sticky with blood. He swallowed, prepared to draw his arms around its neck and twist for good measure.

The creature continued snarling.

It contorted in obvious pain, throwing Carlisle off its back, but it barely seemed to be slowed down. It certainly wasn’t dead like it should be. If anything the pain had spurred it on, as savage rage filled its brown eyes. Carlisle watched in horror as the wound sealed up as quickly as it had been inflicted, the only sign a slim, silver, scar outlining Carlisle’s teeth.

Carlisle wasted no time, and took off running.

He heard the wolf growl loudly before it fell into pursuit.

The absurd thought that this might be payback for all those animals he’d eaten over the years came unbidden. He dashed the useless observation aside and pushed himself to run just a fraction faster.

Just as he pushed that aside, a memory came to him, of a conversation he had with Aro one winter day early in his stay in Volterra.

They were in the library, but Carlisle had given up on trying to read anything. Aro was much too distracting that day, and, as always, too interesting.

They had been talking about gifts, Aro’s peculiar gift in particular, when Carlisle made the mistake of bringing up how vampires were too powerful to be fair.

Carlisle was still young then, and had seen very little of the world. The dogma of his human life still clung to him, and with that the belief that demons and witches existed. Finding out what it meant to be a vampire, that crucifixes, rosaries, and sunlight meant nothing, had been a shock, and certainly he realized that demons and witches would not be what his father had believed, but all the same it had seemed a given to Carlisle that there were other classes of demon out there.

And vampires, with their near indestructibility, unparalleled power, and in some cases daunting gifts, were the first class of demons. Humans stood no chance against them, and he imagined that other demons didn’t either. If they did, he imagined he’d have heard of them by now.

Mostly he simply couldn’t imagine it.

Aro had smiled, a bit bitterly. «I forget how young you are.»

He’d looked away for a moment, lost in memories so ancient they belonged to a time forgotten by humans. Carlisle always felt his breath leave him when he remembered just how old Aro was, which was often. The clouded eyes that should by all accounts have made Aro look unfocused, and the transparent skin that made the vampire look somehow delicate, Carlisle had gotten used to those things. There was no getting used to Aro reminding him how old he was.

Carlisle still remembered his shock when Aro casually dropped, «we passed through Rome - well, Rome wasn’t founded yet, but the geographical area that would later become Rome-» in the middle of an anecdote.

«In the ancient world, before my brothers and I ruled, things were not as they are now. There were other kinds of superhuman creatures, most of them weaker than us, but a few of them stronger.»

Aro had paused then, enjoying the incredulous look on Carlisle’s face.

«Over the years, many succumbed to extinction, as most of them lacked the strength to defend themselves against the humans’ advancing technology. A fairy is no match for a plumbata, nor a nisse for a longsword.»

Carlisle had tried to picture a fairy speared by whatever a plumbata was, failed, and he’d slid his hand across the table to let Aro know he was trying and failing to picture a word he was saying. Aro had grinned. «I’ll show you some sketches Chauron made later.»

«However,» Aro had continued, «there were some who were stronger than the humans, who lived. And some, though thankfully not many, were stronger even than our kind.

The worst of them all were the Children of the Moon. In the day they were human, but come night they transformed into senseless, ravenous wolves nearly the size of a modest hovel. They fed on humans, though with even less control than us.»

Carlisle had frowned. «Like werewolves.»

Aro had nodded, giving him that endeared look he gave Carlisle whenever Carlisle said or did pretty much anything. «Quite. Not that silver worked on them, for that matter, and they turned every night, not just on the full moon. The name comes from their association with the night, not the literal moon.

More importantly, they could hold their own against us. They were impossibly strong, stronger even than newborns, about as fast, nearly invulnerable, and driven at all times by a formidable rage that made them fierce in battle. Like us, one bite was enough to turn a human into a Child of the Moon, although in lieu of our agonizing transformation, the Children of the Moon would merely fever for a week or so. And they travelled in packs of two or more.

Caius rarely speaks of it, but he once found himself locked in battle with one of their kind. Caius is one of the finest warriors I’ve ever come across, and yet he very nearly lost that fight.»

Carlisle had sat in silence, taking it all in.

«What happened to them?» He finally asked.

Aro had given him a grin that was as sharp as any wolf’s. «We did.»

Carlisle had blinked. «You don’t mean...»

A smile that wasn’t a smile at all had twisted Aro’s face into something far colder than what Carlisle was usually allowed to see. «They were a danger to our kind, to humans, and there would be no point to vampires upholding the law if the Children of the Moon were running around rampaging settlements every night.»

Carlisle’s eyes had been wide with horror. «You just said they were human in the day. Couldn’t they be contained, weakened somehow-»

Aro had shaken his head resolutely. «Even if we could contain them, which we could not, would you rather have them live out their lives in captivity? What we did was for the best.»

He’d looked up to meet Carlisle’s eyes then, and his eyes didn’t look clouded at all when he said, «The humans they were in the day knew what they had become and could have chosen to end themselves, as you did, and they would have succeeded. They would rather be cannibals and murderers than face death.»

Carlisle had opened his mouth to point out that Aro himself was a cannibal and a murderer, but Aro hadn’t needed his gift to know what Carlisle was about to say, and beat him to it. «I am not human, nor do I lose control. And the Volturi, as you well know by now, execute those of our kind who cannot learn control, the same as any Child of the Moon.»

«They were monsters in the starkest meaning of the term, and in a way that vampires are not,» Aro had concluded.

Carlisle hadn’t wanted to disbelieve Aro, based on what he had been told he certainly couldn’t have argued that Aro had had a lot of options. All the same it hadn’t sat right with him, it hadn’t sat right with him at all, that vampires should get to learn self-control and live for thousands of years while those humans unfortunate enough to become Children of the Moon should be as good as dead.

They had changed the subject slightly then, onto the maze of other creatures that once existed. As Carlisle had listened to Aro talk excitedly about a Phoenician fish market (he had been in want of a new hat, and got on a five minute tangent explaining Phoenician straw hat weaving techniques. Carlisle was somehow riveted through the whole thing) where he’d found a mermaid tail, he could only muse that Aro had to be the most fascinating person he had ever met, or was likely to ever meet.

The memory sank back to the infinite catalogue in Carlisle’s brain where he stored his crystal clear memories, and Carlisle cursed that he hadn’t thought to ask Aro how to kill one of these damn things.

The wolf was as fast as Aro had said it would be, faster than Carlisle. He had about twenty seconds before it caught up with him. He cursed his decision to neglect feeding after Alice told him he had to go on this trip. It had been two weeks since he last fed. Having his eyes dark enough to pass for brown had seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Now he was going to get eaten by a werewolf.

What an anticlimactic way to die.

Apart from those miserable first few months, Carlisle had never given much thought to his inevitable demise. He was only borrowing immortality. One way or another death would sink its claws into him as it does all beings created by God, and Carlisle saw no point in speculating on the specific form it would take. The only certainty was that his end would be a brutal one, torn apart and burned. 

If somehow he did manage to avoid getting killed, if he survived the Earth itself, not even a vampire would be able to outrun the heat death of the universe.

Although Carlisle would prefer not to live quite so long.

That was another regret he had whenever his mind wandered towards the eternal question of whether creating others had been the right call to make. He had saved Edward, Esme, Rosalie, and Emmett from miserable deaths, but in doing so he’d ensured that the day would come when they perished in pain and fire.

If Carlisle had harbored one wish regarding his own currently impending demise, it was that he wouldn’t outlive those four. Jasper, Alice, and Bella were dear to him, but he was complicit in the births and deaths of Edward, Esme, Rosalie, and Emmett.

So on the upside, it looked like he wasn’t outliving anybody. The werewolf was bounding towards him on all fours, eight feet behind but closing in.

The faces of his colleagues in the cabin flashed before his mind, and he gnashed his teeth at the knowledge of their imminent gruesome deaths. Worse yet, he could only hope that they all died. If one of them survived only to find themselves infected with lycanthropy… 

The thought did not bear dwelling on.

And the wolf would continue. Perhaps it would make its way to Carlisle’s new hometown. If so, he could only hope his children would not perish. His sudden demise would have them on guard, at least. God, he prayed they wouldn’t do anything stupid. But Edward, Emmett, Jasper, and Rosalie together, mourning and furious, with no one calling the stops-

To die such a pointless, anticlimactic death, knowing that over a dozen humans would join him, and to then spend his last moments having his mind spin cruel theories about how his children might end up following him…

Carlisle had always refuted Aro whenever the older vampire speculated that God must have a demented sense of humor, but this entire evening, from pretending to be a tipsy human partying with his colleagues, to having a Child of the Moon appear out of nowhere to eat him-

Siobhan once relayed to Carlisle that there were those in the world of vampires who thought he was an attention seeker. He’d been shocked, of course, but he had to admit that he did see how someone might get that idea.

The werewolf was closer than ever. Carlisle wondered if he had time to make it to a river, if he could submerge himself underwater until the creature gave up. However, he doubted that a lack of oxygen would be enough to stop a creature that had just shaken off Carlisle eating a piece of its spine like it was nothing. And he couldn’t hear a body of water anywhere near anyway, so it was moot point.

In those last few seconds before the creature caught up with him, Carlisle gave himself to planning his attack. It was a lost fight, he knew, but Carlisle had no intention of going gently into that good night. And if he could prolong the fight, inflict enough injury that it slowed down…

He was the only thing standing between those humans and certain death, and futile or not, that meant something.

The wolf was a foot behind him when Carlisle spun on the spot and came to that particular immediate halt that only creatures not entirely bound by physics could do. The wolf bounded towards him, arms widening, and its jaws opened wide to reveal a mouth filled with too many teeth. Carlisle zipped out of the way at the last moment, and delivered a kick as hard as he could between the wolf’s shoulder blades.

The wolf’s own momentum helped, and it flew a good forty yards. Carlisle scaled the nearest tree, and was about to jump from the treetop towards a tall yew tree, aiming to get as high as he could to see if there was something in the distance, anything, that he could use to his advantage.

Unfortunately, he never made it that far.

As fast as a gunshot the wolf soared up that same tree, and in the next instant it had its jaws around Carlisle’s thigh, its teeth sliding through the diamond-hard skin nearly as easily as they had Dr. Wayne’s. Its arms wrapped around Carlisle’s waist, and they fell together, the wolf immediately putting Carlisle on his back and straddling him.

With disturbing ease, Carlisle’s arm had been removed as well.

Next to him his leg fell on the ground with a loud thunking noise, having been slowed by the thick branches.

The wolf, on the high alert for enemies, snarled at the leg. Carlisle used its distraction to sit up and dig his teeth into the wolf’s throat, trying to inflict as much damage as he could. The wolf’s neck was too thick for Carlisle to realistically be able to get its head off, not with its quick healing and lack of a second arm, but it was about the only thing for him to do.

The wolf tolerated Carlisle’s efforts for about a second, almost as if his efforts amused it, before two impossibly strong arms grabbed Carlisle by the shoulders and forced him back down.

_Oh, god,_ Carlisle realized as the putrid stench of its breath hit his face full force and the wolf leaned down towards him with surprising slowness, _it’s going to eat my face_.

As the wolf shot forwards, obscuring Carlisle’s vision with teeth, Carlisle shot his own remaining arm upward, aiming for wolf’s sternum, not even sure what he was hoping for.

The wolf’s own speed helped his momentum, and his hand broke through skin, bone, and tissue. The creature howled in pain, and in the tenth of a second before its teeth would have been on him, Carlisle grasped blindly at a thick, beating, large organ - _was that a heart?!_ \- and pulled it from the werewolf’s chest.

The wolf collapsed, like a puppet whose strings had been cut, but Carlisle wasted no time, shoving whatever he’d just pulled out into his mouth, chewing once and swallowing, in case this thing was like vampires and could regenerate if it got its body parts back.

For a brief moment he stood there, the blood so delicious and saturating the muscle that he barely tasted the ashy flavor of the organ itself, and stared at the prone werewolf on top of him, waiting for it to attack him again.

That couldn’t be it.

He rolled them around so he was the one on top, and let his killing instincts guide him. He tore its chest open further, and buried his face in the cavity, ripping its internal organs with his teeth and drinking its blood.

He had had a teaser when he turned Edward, Esme, Rosalie, and Emmett, but their blood had barely been on his mind, he’d been busy trying to save them.

Now, on the other hand…

The werewolf’s blood was so rich and filling, so filling, it felt like he was drinking Life itself. He didn’t even feel the pain of his missing limbs, he was too lost in this pleasure.

Like seeping mist, he felt that haze of senseless bloodlust creep into him, and for once he let it.

It was a full minute later that he withdrew to look at what he’d made of his would-be-killer. It was definitely dead this time, he thought, as his wide eyes took in its open, broken, ravaged body.

Oh, god, he’d done exactly what that thing just did to Dr. Wayne.

He hadn’t just killed it, he’d torn it apart and fed on its flesh, like any other vampire. That wouldn’t actually bother him so much, the wolf was a felled enemy, but that _taste_ …

The Children of the Moon were once human, and though the night made them demons, by day they were as any other man, indistinguishable from the herd.

And their blood, apparently, remained the same even after the transformation.

His eyes, he realized with dawning horror. They had to be red now.

Three hundred years of an undiluted, humanitarian yellow, and now he’d have to face that dreadful color in his reflection for months. It stung. 

And he could bear that embarrassment, face that horrible color in the mirror, certainly this would make Jasper’s century. God, and he’d have to avoid all his friends, or they’d never let him forget this. Not that his family was going to let him forget about this anytime soon. Emmett and Jasper especially would make the most of this, he just knew it.

But the humans would have questions.

The Nokia was out of his pocket before he’d even finished the thought, and he hit the speed dial button for Alice.

The phone rang.

_Pick up_ , Carlisle urged mentally.

It continued ringing.

Carlisle decided to burn their house down.

Still no answer.

Alice was nowhere near her phone, then. The whole family had gone on a hunt, and out of fear of geo-tracking they never brought electronics with them, so it was hardly a surprise, but Carlisle desperately needed her advice.

He ended the call, and texted his family an all-caps message to call him immediately. He ended with two exclamation marks, for once not bothered by orthographical conventions.

He then reattached his arm and leg, licking the stumps to make them heal quicker. He sent thanks to Jasper for always giving his family the strangest, most disturbing, life tips. 

He flinched as the limbs fused back to his body. It stung, as if the area where they melded was crawling with glass shards. He supposed it couldn’t be helped.

The thought that this could scar came to him, and he flinched again. He did not want to carry the reminder of this awful night for eternity.

He wondered if he had time to go back and fetch Dr. Wayne, and dispose of the body along with the werewolf.

But no - he had to be back with the humans as soon as possible, or they would have questions, and he was covered in enough blood to do a decent Carrie impression. He also had a werewolf carcass that took top priority. There was no time to hide Dr. Wayne.

He wondered for a brief moment if he actually should return with his now blood red eyes, or if he should stay gone, let them assume that whatever had gotten Dr. Wayne had killed him as well.

But no - no one had seen him leave, and they wouldn’t find any blood other than Dr. Wayne’s on the scene, there would be no indication anything had happened to Carlisle. The only reasonable explanation for his mysterious absence would be his involvement in the incident, which in turn would rouse far worse questions, as well as an investigation.

No, that wouldn’t do at all.

He picked up the werewolf’s remains, gathering the large carcass as best as he could in his arms without anything spilling to the snow-covered ground, and ran as he thought. The wind pulled the still-wet blood off his face like a car drying in a carwash, a mildly distracting sensation.

He was faster than normal, he noted in surprise. He wasn’t even running at full speed, yet he was significantly faster than usual. He could easily leave Edward in the dust like this.

He sped up, marvelling at the difference, and wondered briefly just how unethical it would be if he measured his newfound speed and strength against his regular power, to finally gain an empirical answer to the strength disparity between a man-eating and an animal-leating vampire.

He had always wanted to know, but between his friends refusing to try the diet and his family being too ashamed for slipping up for him to even consider asking, «Could we turn this into one of my esoteric science projects?», he never got the chance to find out.

But there were more pressing matters at hand.

Aro had been right so far about these creatures, and he had said the Children of the Moon travelled in packs. A lone Child of the Moon was a rarity. It would be different now, as they had been driven to the point of extinction, but Carlisle was not willing to gamble on that.

He’d won against this one, but he wasn’t arrogant enough to believe he would prevail twice against Children of the Moon, and should he be outnumbered he would die in seconds. And he was stuck with the humans in Whitefish until further notice, unless he wanted to attract attention by leaving early.

Then there was the matter that for all that Carlisle still wasn’t sure he agreed with Aro’s totalitarian view, judging by what he’d just seen, the Volturi had had good reason to issue their indictment against werewolves.

Edward had once, when he was very young, asked Carlisle why, since he wanted to preserve human life, he let other vampires carry on killing humans, never lifting a finger to help those humans, even befriending countless of these vampires. Carlisle had replied by asking why they didn’t kill humans who killed other humans.

His point being, all life had worth.

He’d thought that there could be no exception to that, at least not among sentient beings, no creature so cursed that it did not deserve the gift of his life.

And yet now, Children of the Moon had him less than sure.

They were certainly sentient, in their human half of the time they were as capable of reason as any other man, and Carlisle still firmly believed the only one with the right to deem a being undeserving of life, was the Lord.

But there had been nothing of human reason in the wolf’s eyes, and no sign of God within it either.

It had come to do one thing, to kill, and it would have killed far more given the chance.

Carlisle knew from personal experience the terror and pain of being attacked by a vampire, it was not something he would ever forget. To the wolf’s credit, Dr. Wayne never knew what happened to him.

But vampires could learn control, and they were only hungry every fortnight. 

He felt more than a little like a hypocrite, and he hated the decision that was forming even as he made it.

But he couldn’t turn his back on Whitefish and go home to his family, knowing that countless humans would be turned into Jackson Pollard paintings.

He needed backup for what he was going to do.

Alice had yet to be able to see creatures who weren’t strictly human or strictly vampire. The fact that she couldn’t see Renesmée, who was half of both, was damning. Carlisle doubted she would be able to see the werewolves, so unless the family changed plans and went home, they would not get his message. He couldn’t run to them either, they were only about two hour’s run away, but should he be followed, he would potentially be leading a vampire killing machine straight to his unprepared family members.

Jacob would probably pick up the phone and then he could get a hold of Alice. But that thought was dismissed as soon as it came to Carlisle. Jacob would not content himself with sending Carlisle’s family off to do glorious battle while the two wolf packs sat on their hands, he would more likely skip the telling the vampires part and come to Whitefish himself, Clearwaters in tow. Sam would likely come as well. Carlisle couldn’t imagine that would go well. They were weaker than animal-eating vampires, far more mortal than either Carlisle or the creature he’d just faced, and ripping the wolf’s heart out the way Carlisle had required opposable thumbs. If it came to a confrontation with another Child of the Moon, the shapeshifters would only be cannon fodder.

And that was even assuming Jacob would take Carlisle’s side.

Jacob was himself a werewolf, and he hadn’t heard any of the stories, never seen one of these in action. To him, vampires were the greatest evil on this earth, and he’d likely believe he had much in common with the Children of the Moon. Jacob would almost certainly balk at Carlisle’s no-buts-instruction to help him kill a werewolf, and Carlisle’s red eyes wouldn’t exactly do wonders for his credibility.

What was more, when Bella had been a newborn vampire, Jacob had sent Charlie running to see her because he didn’t want Renesmée to move. Carlisle wouldn’t pretend to understand imprinting, but he did understand someone doing whatever the hell they wanted, to hell with everyone else.

No, Jacob was not an option.

There was always the Denali.

But they hadn’t exactly come through in the past, not even when Carlisle and his family had been facing a newborn army. He was grateful that they had agreed to give testimony before the Volturi, but there could be no denying that concern for their sister Irina had been significant encouragement. Garrett would probably come, but he was just one vampire, and that wasn’t enough to put Carlisle at ease.

Mostly, Carlisle could not forget that when the chips came falling down, Tanya, Kate, Eleazar, and Carmen had not blinked at letting the Cullens face those newborns on their own. Without the shapeshifters, there would have been losses.

He cared much for the Denali and did not bear a grudge, but they were not friends he could rely on.

He spotted a large tree in the distance, and soon he was kneeling by it, shoving the werewolf’s carcass underneath and digging snow up to cover it. It wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do. Certainly it bought him the time he needed to go back to the humans and get an alibi.

As he sprinted back to the cabin, rubbing his hair in with fistfuls of snow in an effort to get some of the blood out, his mind regretfully found itself drawing the one conclusion there was to make.

The Volturi.

On a purely practical level, he needed their expertise. Effective executions was what the Volturi were for, a Child of the Moon would be no exception. The Volturi were the ones who had hunted them to the point of extinction after all, and Carlisle was now begrudgingly impressed by that.

On a less prosaic note, Carlisle knew that he was on thin ice after the whole Renesmée debacle. The Volturi had a strict law that all Children of the Moon were to be killed on sight, and they would want the whole area searched now that there was one Child of the Moon confirmed. Should they learn that Carlisle had known there might be one in Montana and failed to report it, that would be interpreted in the worst possible way.

Carlisle pursed his lips.

He really had no desire to ask Aro’s help, not after everything that had happened, but he couldn’t justify putting his friends or family in danger either, or letting humans pay the price for a werewolf being on the loose the way poor Dr. Wayne had.

The decision was made, then.

Again he cursed Alice not picking up the phone. His family, with the ambivalent exception of Jasper, had no love for the Volturi. Bella, Edward, and Alice in particular lived in terror of them. They would be furious with Carlisle for summoning the Volturi to their neighboring state, and he couldn’t blame them. Carlisle could only hope they would forgive him.

And that Aro wouldn’t give him reason to regret this.

He briefly considered the thought of phoning Jacob to let him know, or just telling the young man (well, physically he was older than Carlisle by now, but who’s counting?) to get someone in his family to the phone, but that wouldn’t do. The Volturi represented everything Jacob and his people hated, and he would not understand why Carlisle was calling them, and he would be insulted if Carlisle told him to bring the phone directly to his family, implicitly not trusting him to relay the message. Renesmée wouldn’t be much better, for all her gift supposedly let people know what she was thinking, most of the time Carlisle had no idea what was going through her head at all, and he did not feel confident she would actually do what he asked her.

He couldn’t afford for miscommunication to muddle things up now that he was bringing Aro into the mix.

Again, there was the Denali, they could perhaps find a way to contact the others, and Tanya was normally someone Carlisle could trust with this sort of thing. However, ever since Irina’s death, the Denali coven, Garrett included, had been… well, if vampires could die by the guillotine, Tanya would have one with Caius’ name on it.

As the cabin came into view, Carlisle knew that he was not only going to have to summon the Volturi, but he would have to do so behind everyone’s backs.


	2. Chapter 2

Carlisle was sitting in his hotel room, staring at his phone.

The number was dialled, but pressing that call button was easier said than done.

At least getting back to the humans had gone smoothly.

The body had only just been discovered when Carlisle returned. Carlisle had slipped inside the cabin and up the stairs to his room unseen, and was out of his torn and bloodied clothes by the time a hysterical and incoherent Dr. Gibbons had screamed for the others to come outside.

Realizing that he had to get rid of those blood-soaked clothes somehow, he’d shoved them into his mouth. The venom would dissolve them, making it as good a way of getting rid of evidence as any.

Still, as he wasted a full five seconds chewing his way through his wardrobe, listening to the horror of the humans outside, he’d wished he hadn’t let Alice persuade him to go for layers.

There hadn’t been any time to shower off the blood still on him, and what was more, he’d had no interest in getting blood in the drain. One could always be more paranoid. After a moment’s debate, he’d thrown on his spare set of clothes, pulled a hat as far as it would go down over his hair, and rushed outside to blend in with the crowd.

The sheriff, to his credit, had arrived much sooner than Carlisle had expected for a small town sheriff in the middle of the night, along with an ambulance.

The shellshocked party attendants had then been given lifts back to the centre of the town, where the sheriff had had the good foresight to alert a hotel to accommodate them.

And now, one ice bath in Whitefish river and several minutes throwing up the dissolved gunk that was once slimy textile and werewolf entrails later, Carlisle was sitting on his bed staring at that damn phone. The phone number to the Volturi was typed in and his finger hovered over the dial button.

Memories of Volterra flashed by his inner eye, as crystal clear as if he was there even now.

Carlisle had made many friends over the years, but there had always been a clear distinction between Aro and his other friends, one that had nothing to do with diets.

When Carlisle first arrived in Volterra, he had in all ways except for his inhumanity been pastor Cullen’s son. Vampires, as far as he was concerned, were foul harbingers of darkness, death, and disease. They were savage beasts who had lost all reason and humanity. He’d even believed vampires didn’t have souls: how could they, when they devoured men so thoughtlessly?

His only explanation for his own exempt state had been that his refusal to consume human blood had somehow rendered his transformation unfinished. That in refusing those red pomegranate seeds, he hadn’t allowed Hades to drag him to the underworld.

It had seemed a sort of justice, that his mortality could be stolen from him, but he could still refuse the Devil to consume him completely. One thin thread of autonomy, when he had already lost so much.

And then Aro came in and turned it all on its head.

Not only had Aro been as sophisticated and generous as the finest of human nobility, but his brilliance shone so brightly that he had made it impossible for Carlisle to still believe that vampires could be inherently evil. Wise, enthusiastic, timeless, and so very genuine in his every word, belief, and emotion, he was a blinding light in Carlisle’s formerly black and lonely world, and Carlisle was as helpless to resist as any moth.

The word friend,  _ amico _ , so close to  _ amato _ , and from there  _ amante _ , had always been the one Carlisle preferred to use for Aro, and Aro in turn for him. It was the best fitting. In life, Carlisle had been too consumed by his studies and the burden of his father’s mission to socialize, and in death he hadn’t socialized with anybody at all. Aro had been his first taste of what it meant to cherish a person simply for their company, and he’d loved him for that.

The fact that Aro still chose to feed on humans, to let his Volturi kill hundreds of people each year, never did fully leave the air between them, but with time Carlisle came to see that as a corruption of an otherwise good person’s soul.

He could hardly blame Aro, or any of the vampires he later came to know through his long life. They had all been born into this alien new life, faced with this brutal thirst, and not known of any other way to satiate it.

Carlisle, he’d known even when he wanted death in those early months, had been immensely lucky that his creator had abandoned him. Any responsible maker, as Aro had often complained, would have forced him to feed in those early days when Carlisle would not have been able to resist. As it was, that it was deer he’d come across when he was starved out of his mind, had been nothing less than an act of God. 

He’d been lucky, too, in that he had known when he woke up what he had become and dreaded it. Without that warning, that prejudice ingrained in who he was… and then to spend years living like that, until human life didn’t matter at all, until the best a human could hope to be to a vampire was a potential vampire themselves-

Yes, Carlisle could all too easily understand how his kinsmen ended up the way they were, and why they thought him quite eccentric for showing up with his sickly yellow eyes and malnourished weakness, wanting them to go live off dishwater so that the mayfly humans could go die of consumption instead.

It was one of the reasons Carlisle was so awed by Edward’s enduring spirit, that even after succumbing to his bloodlust and spending years allowing it to consume him, Edward should come to fully understand the sanctity of life. That Edward not only understood this, but had the courage to return to face Carlisle…

After Edward there had been Jasper, Alice, and the Denali. They had all chosen to give up the greatest pleasure known to vampires, the very point of their existence, and claw their way back to a better, more compassionate, and infinitely harder way of life. Carlisle cherished them all for their nobility and was in awe of their sacrifice as well, but nothing would ever parallel that moment when Edward first came back. It had been the first time someone who knew what they were missing still chose to abstain, and it had meant more than Carlisle could ever express.

All the same, Aro had always remained dear to Carlisle, even as the centuries passed. In this, Carlisle had always been grateful for the perfect clarity of a vampire’s recollection. His precious memories would never slip from his mind when he wasn’t looking, the way humans would find themselves helpless as their most dear and irreplaceable memories became lost to them.

And then came the free reign granted to Victoria’s army, Bree Tanner’s needless death, and the near execution of Carlisle’s entire family.

Even now, years after the fact, a part of Carlisle still didn’t want to believe it. That the Volturi would first ignore their duty while a herd of newborns painted Seattle red with blood, then carry it out unjustly upon a girl who was innocent in all the ways that counted, and, finally, attempt to kill Carlisle’s entire coven.

That Aro would do all that, throw aside a friendship Carlisle knew had meant something, let Carlisle be destroyed, all for the sake of adding one more gifted vampire to his ranks- 

Carlisle had tried, and tried, and then tried some more, to turn events around so that he could still see his old, luminous, friend from this new, unflattering, angle, but he’d failed.

Aro’s actions, it seemed, were very different from what he’d allowed Carlisle to see when they were together in Volterra.

And now Carlisle was sitting here, staring at that damnable phone, as he had been for thirty minutes now.

He had no time to lose.

And yet.

There had been another phone call.

After Edward’s miraculous return from Volterra, Carlisle had phoned Aro to relay his unending gratitude, and to let him know that Bella would become immortal soon (he’d neglected to mention that even after receiving a direct order from Aro, the Cullens had still voted on the issue).

Their last interaction as friends, Carlisle knew now, though it hadn’t even been that.

Aro had been happy enough to hear his voice, but there had been a tone of something else in his voice, a hesitant lilt as Carlisle could hear his reluctance to say whatever was truly on his mind. A sadness, even. Eventually, Aro had very cryptically warned him about Edward. Carlisle had recognized Aro’s reluctance for what it was then, it was the reluctance of someone who wasn’t sure how much they should say, if anything.

Aro had not elaborated much, but he had made it very clear that he had very deep misgivings about Edward’s character, particularly pertaining to his relationship with Bella, though it seemed there was more than that.

At the time, Carlisle had been shocked by Aro’s words, and believed none of it («I knew you wouldn’t,» Aro had said, his voice too humorless to be wry, «but keep my words in mind.»).

And love Edward though Carlisle did, he trusted Aro. And he had looked for it, whatever Aro might have seen, some hint of something in his son that wasn’t as it should be, that needed help.

He had seen none of it, and quite happily assumed that Aro had simply been mistaken.

But then the newborn army came, and it would without doubt have killed someone in Carlisle’s family if the shapeshifters hadn’t come to their aid. And then the Volturi had come to execute the coven.

There had come a terrible, sickening, point when Carlisle realized that everything about that phone call - Aro’s reluctance, his odd humor, his warning - it all made a very sinister sense if Aro was lying.

If Aro had decided, at some point between Edward’s departure from Volterra and Carlisle’s phone call, that Alice’s gift was worth it all, then sowing discord within the coven when Carlisle handed him such a golden opportunity would be a very logical step to take.

But, god, it was so despicable.

Carlisle absolutely could not reconcile that, or any of what the Volturi had done to his family, with the friend he’d once had.

Looking at it from that angle, Carlisle once again asked himself what on earth he was doing, summoning the Volturi.

But it could not be helped.

And this way, he thought grimly, he would have a chance to find out just how much of the wonderful person he’d seen in Aro truly existed and how much had been a smokescreen. His only chance, most likely.

For Aro would want to come personally, Carlisle would wager Alice’s annual clothes budget on that much.

The knowledge that Aro would read his thoughts, and know exactly what Carlisle thought, brought Carlisle no small amount of mixed feelings. Even now, his heart sank at the thought of Aro having to see yet another person turned against him, and yet a very ugly, though thankfully small part of Carlisle would be glad to see Aro share some of his hurt.

Now if only he could press that call button.

Finally, with the quickness of ripping off a bandaid, Carlisle pressed it. He flinched as he almost pressed his finger straight through the phone, but the little Nokia survived.

Too late to change his mind now.

The phone barely made it through its first ring before a pleasant, female, human, voice answered. «Ciao, sto Francesca! Non conosco questo numerò, chi è?»

The secretary’s tone was just a touch too informal as she pretended the caller had reached a private number. Carlisle’s lips quirked upwards. Aro had always been fond of convoluted schemes, the more intricate the better, but it seemed Marcus and Caius had won through with this one.

«Sono Carlisle,» Carlisle replied, a frown ghosting across his forehead when he heard the secretary gasp on the other end of the line. «E disponibile Aro?» he asked.

«Si-» the secretary began, before the phone was audibly snapped out of her grasp.

«Carlisle, this is a surprise,» Aro breathed into the phone, his tone unreadable.

Carlisle smiled wryly, forgetting for a moment that Aro wouldn’t be able to see his expression. «For me as well,» he simply said.

«Forgive me for being so blunt,» Aro almost seemed to cut himself off, but he continued before Carlisle could be sure, «but why are you calling?» 

A beat.

«I doubt this is a social call,» Aro added.

His voice, usually so transparent to Carlisle’s ears, his emotions as easily deciphered as Carlisle’s thoughts were to him, was closed off. Carlisle could not guess at what he was thinking at all.

Carlisle’s eyes rose to trace patterns in the ceiling. «It’s not a social call,» he confirmed.

He really should have spared a moment to plan this conversation. How had that slipped his mind?

Closing his eyes briefly and leaning back to recline on the bed, Carlisle let out a small sigh. «I suppose it’s best if I start from the beginning.

Alice cornered me about a week ago. I’m not blending in well with the humans, so she advised me to join them on a weekend trip to Whitefish, Montana, in a slightly remote cabin. We arrived today, scheduled to stay until Sunday.» Aro didn’t need to speak for Carlisle to know that his eyebrows had risen far above their station, his silence spoke volumes on its own.

«Earlier tonight, at about eleven PM, I heard a noise outside, and went to see what it was just in time to watch what could only have been a Child of the Moon eat one of my colleagues.»

Aro gasped audibly, and in the background Carlisle could hear commotion as a lot of vampires started talking at once. He could only imagine. If Aro was talking from the reception hall as Carlisle suspected, just about every vampire in Volterra would be within earshot. And it seemed they were all eavesdropping. He pinched the bridge of his nose with his available hand as he listened to Aro shush them hurriedly. «Carlisle,» he said, urgency in his voice, «where are you and where is that wolf? Is there a body of water nearby? Can you get to a lake? Do you-»

Carlisle cut him off as politely as he could. «It’s fine, it’s fine, if you would let me finish-»

Aro exhaled slowly, and his voice was very terse, the words fast and hard as bullets from a machine gun when he continued, «If that was truly a Child of the Moon then you are very lucky to have gotten away and quite ignorant to think this is fine. You do not know what those things are capable of, and let me assure you, you do not want to find out!»

«But I’m glad you called,» he added, the civil words tacked on at the end, barely surviving the sentence before his voice became an order again, «Find a place to hide, now. We will take care of this.»

There was no room for debate, and Carlisle cringed. Aro was not going to like the rest of this story. 

«It’s already dead, Aro.»

God, he could just hear Aro’s facial expression. «Dead? What do you mean, dead?»

«I killed it?»

There was a long pause.

«That can’t have been a real Child of the Moon.»

Carlisle’s face scrunched up. He wasn’t one for manly pride and testosterone, but Aro’s utter lack of faith in his prowess, that there wasn’t even a question, was a bit rankling. «Huge,» he deadpanned. «Stronger than a newborn, it tore off two of my limbs like they were nothing. Faster than me, weirdly humanoid, opposable thumbs, delectable blood, cannibalistic.»

Finally, with a voice drier than any desert, he couldn’t resist adding, «If I’ve discovered a brand new creature, then we should all be very concerned.»

Aro was very silent on the other end of the phone. 

Finally, «What do you mean,  _ delectable blood _ ?»

«Oh.» Carlisle said, and if he could still blush then he would be Bella levels of red just about now, «That’s not important. If we could-»

He heard Aro gasp, his loudest thus far in the conversation. Carlisle cringed.

«You didn’t.»

Carlisle gazed tiredly up at the ceiling with his red, red, eyes, and said nothing.

«Carlisle, did you eat the werewolf?» Aro whispered.

«It was very hard to kill,» Carlisle dodged, searching for a conversational way out before conceding. «In other words… yes. Alright. I ate the werewolf.» He finally admitted.

Aro was silent on the other end of the phone for several long moments, even as Carlisle heard cheers erupt in the background from the vampires who were apparently still very much within earshot, along with laughter and wolf whistles. All his hopes that eating werewolves was a perfectly normal thing that vampires often did to celebrate glorious victory were dashed.

«What color are your eyes?» Aro asked.

«Let’s get back to the point, I was trying to make one,» Carlisle tried, but he couldn’t quite keep the terse note from his voice.

«They’re red, aren’t they?»

More cheers in the background.

«Aro…» Carlisle complained.

«They’re finally red!» Aro whooped. «After all these years, centuries, and you snap over a werewolf. Oh, my dear friend Carlisle, how I miss you and your- I don’t even know what to call it, I never know what to expect from you!» Aro released a delighted, tinkling, laughter.

«I’m glad someone’s enjoying this,» Carlisle muttered, though a smile wormed its way onto his lips at the sound of Aro’s infectious laughter.

God, how easy it was to fall back into old patterns.

«Well, I’m sure you enjoyed yourself quite a bit as well! I’ll admit this wasn’t how I envisioned your surrender, but I’m happy for you, I really am. Say, is there any-» Aro was speaking so rapidly no human could have followed him.

«Aro, could we get back to…?» he interrupted, knowing where Aro was headed and not interested in hearing it.

«Oh, yes, yes, werewolves. Yes. You really did kill one,» Aro’s wonder had his voice a full octave higher than usual.

Carlisle nodded. «Through luck rather than skill, I suspect I was too pathetic a foe to warrant a swift elimination. I have no illusions about how a second fight would turn out. That’s why I’m calling,» he explained.

«You fear there are others,» Aro murmured, his good cheer replaced by concern once again, though his voice was still several degrees warmer than it had been when the conversation had started.

Carlisle pressed his lips together. «You told me they prefer to travel in packs.»

«They do, it comes naturally to them. There was a pack of five roaming the desolate planes of Australia as recently as in the 90’s, so sparsity in numbers hasn’t kept them from colluding. All it takes is for a single human to survive a bite. There’s a reason the Children of the Moon still endure, after over a thousand years of effort from us.»

Carlisle bit his lip. «Body of water, you say?»

«Where are you?» Aro asked. 

«At a hotel in Whitefish,» Carlisle replied. 

«Good. Contact your family. Get them to come pick you up, now, the whole coven, and then you all leave. Thank you for reporting this.» That urgency was back in Aro’s voice, as if the sooner he got the words out, the sooner Carlisle would be camping out on the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Carlisle pressed his lips together. How much easier this conversation would have been if his friendship with Aro was what it had once been, and Carlisle wasn’t double and triple guessing every word out of his own mouth before speaking, for fear of somehow giving away information that could be abused. 

«About that,» he began.

«Don’t give me any buts,» Aro said, and he sounded so tired, as if this entire mess was somehow Carlisle’s fault. «And certainly don’t try anything tonight. Get back to your family-»

«My family has gone on a hunt,» Carlisle cut him off. «They’re deep in the woods, they could be in Canada for all I know. We never bring electronics. Ah, contacting them is easier said than done.»

There was yet another pause.

«Are the shapeshifters or young Renesmée with them?»

Carlisle frowned for a second, before realizing where Aro was going. «No, Alice can see clearly.» He further realized exactly what Aro was thinking, and sat up with a start. «No. No. No, Aro, you’re not doing that.»

«Your family needs to get in touch with you as soon as possible, Carlisle, your life could depend on it. I think they’ll forgive me one brief scare.»

«If Alice suddenly has a vision of the Volturi showing up, she’ll think-»

«Yes, she’ll assume the worst. She’ll alert the others, and they’ll rush to contact you. You can explain, and they’ll pick you up. I’ll decide that we’re all wearing funny hats when we come visit, if that makes it less threatening.» It was amazing how Aro made it all sound perfectly reasonable.

«That’s more threatening, Aro!  _ More _ ! That’s sinister!» Gesturing furiously as he yelled into the phone wasn’t helping, but Carlisle did it anyway.

Aro hmph-ed, impatience back in his voice. «Carlisle, I hate to use this to sway your judgement, but the Children of the Moon cover vast areas. They actively hunt vampires. Should there be more of them nearby, and your children are out hunting in the woods- need I finish?»

He didn’t, the implication was unmistakable. Carlisle sucked in a sharp breath.

«A vision like this will see them gathered, and out of the woods,» Aro said, just a touch too reasonably.

Carlisle’s voice was cold as ice when he replied, «And if I refuse?»

«How about a vision of just myself and Renata dropping by, with the funny hats?»

Carlisle opened his mouth to argue, but the words didn’t make it out past his lips as he allowed Aro’s words to sink in.

His family would usually split up, into couples and trios, when they hunted. Jasper liked to go off on his own. If there were enemies lurking in the grass…

It was easy enough to refuse Aro’s ludicrous idea that he could only too easily take advantage of when it was just Carlisle’s life on the line, but should anything happen to one of his children, something he could have prevented, he would never be able to forgive himself.

Damnit. 

Aro wasn’t playing fair.

«Fine,» Carlisle gritted out, more hostile than intended, an accomplishment since he’d intended for it to be pretty hostile already.

Aro drew in a sharp breath. «I won’t make you regret this, Carlisle,» he said quietly. It sounded like he wanted those words to say far more than that.

Carlisle glared at the wall, vexed that he had no choice but to trust Aro on this.

«I just made the decision, I imagine she’ll be in touch soon. Be gone as fast you can,» Aro instructed, his demeanor back to authoritative, «but come daylight, Children of the Moon become ordinary humans, and you will be safe.»

Carlisle pouted. That was a full eight hours from now.

«We’ll be there as soon as we can, certainly before nightfall tomorrow,» Aro continued, and Carlisle’s eyes widened momentarily. It had taken the Volturi a near month to get to Forks when they thought they were persecuting an immortal child, yet now a nearly identical trip took less than a day?

But Aro continued before Carlisle could blurt anything, «I would appreciate it if you gathered the wolf’s remains,  _ after daybreak _ , and put them somewhere for us to find, the trunk of a car would do. It’ll help with tracing the wolf.»

Carlisle frowned. «How so?»

He supposed if there was one person on this earth who’d go and become a werewolf forensics expert it would be Aro, but all that came up when he tried to picture it was Aro as Temperance Brennan and Caius as the ever-scoffing Booth, and that vision just didn’t seem to have any root in reality.

«When daylight strikes the body, it turns back to human form,» Aro explained, as if shapeshifting corpses were a perfectly obvious thing.

Carlisle cringed. What a wonderful reminder that would be of precisely what he’d eaten. God, it was craven of him, but he did not want to see his victim’s human face. «Great,» he said with feigned enthusiasm, before cringing some more as that had not been an appropriate response.

«I will, I mean,» he said before Aro could remark upon his exclamation, «I’ll text you the car’s registration number and where I parked it.»

«Good,» Aro said.

«Good,» Carlisle replied.

And that, apparently, was that.

«I’ll be in touch,» Aro said, though there was a strange regretful lilt to his voice, as if he had wanted to say something different.

Carlisle only nodded. «Talk to you later, then,» he replied, and hung up.

He fell back onto the bed, and resigned himself to waiting for the phone to ring.

He’d never admit it, but he was glad Aro had thought of a way to get Alice’s attention, however brutal it might be. It would be a godsend to see his family again after this nightmare of a day. And with the Volturi now involved, they certainly needed to talk.

Closing his eyes, Carlisle tried to busy his mind with meaningless exercises as he waited.

* * *

By the time daylight broke eight hours later, Carlisle was still staring at that phone.

Alice had never called.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Amico - Italian - friend. Amato - Italian - to love past tense, so for instance «sei amato», you’re loved. Amante - Italian and French - lover.
> 
> Italian sentences are my rudimentary Italian, I am not a fluent speaker. For those interested, the secretary said «Hi, I’m Francesca! I don’t know this number, who’s this?» and Carlisle replied «I’m Carlisle, is Aro available?»
> 
> Thanks again to The Carnivorous Muffin, my absolute gem of a beta.


	3. Chapter 3

_«This is Alice! Leave a message! I’ll call you back!»_

_«The message is call me.»_

* * *

_«You’ve reached Rosalie Hale. Please leave a message.»_

_«Call me, Rose, the moment you get this.»_

* * *

_«If you need me to tell you whose phone this is, you’ve got the wrong number.»_

_«Call me when you get this, Emmett.»_

* * *

_«This is Edward Cullen’s voicemail, I’m afraid I’m not by my phone at the moment. Please leave me a message, so I can get back to you.»_

_«Call me. Immediately.»_

* * *

_«Cullen residence, leave a message!»_

_«Esme. Call me, it’s extremely important.»_

* * *

_«You’ve reached Jasper. I’m not going to check this, so you should try again later.»_

* * *

_«Bella Cullen! Leave a message!»_

_«Bella, you need to call me now.»_

* * *

Breakfast at the hotel that morning was a somber affair.

The breakfast hall was divided in two by an invisible line. On one side, the traumatized hospital employees who had come into the hall the second it opened and weren’t so much having breakfast so much as they were having a group therapy session. On the other, the early bird tourists who were actually there to eat.

For once, Carlisle’s pallor and shadowed eyes didn’t stand out as much. Hardly anybody appeared to have gotten any sleep, and every eye was rimmed with red.

Not as red as Carlisle’s irises, though.

«Cullen, your eyes! What happened?» Dr. Mehdi exclaimed in shock.

Around the table, the others looked up to see what they’d failed to notice in the tumultuousness of the night before, and he saw their eyes widen at the unnatural color.

Carlisle’s eyes, he knew from the mirror, were a bright, solid, glowing red, the kind of color not found in humans, not even humans wearing colored contacts. If he were a movie character, he’d look like cheap CGI.

At least the werewolf’s fangs in his thigh hadn’t left any scars. That would have been the wretched cherry on top of a miserable night.

«I drank too much,» Carlisle deadpanned.

The only other explanation he had been able to come up with was «in my grief and shock I ran out to buy colored contacts in the middle of the night», and that would only create more questions.

Besides, telling the truth gave him a sort of morbid satisfaction. Call it an expression of guilt.

Dr. Mehdi’s hesitated, a frown flickered across his face. As a doctor he would know just as well as Carlisle that no amount of drinking could turn a person’s eyes into traffic stop lights.

But then, either choosing not to pursue it or just accepting the Occam’s Razor Carlisle had just offered him, Dr. Mehdi nodded in understanding. His lips went through the motions of forming a smile, but what stretched across his face was more of a grimace. «Can’t blame you there,» he said. 

As Carlisle relaxed he smelled the alcohol on Dr. Mehdi’s breath and saw the lingering slowness in his gestures.

Dr. Mehdi had been close to Dr. Wayne. All these humans were close. They’d grown up together, knew each other’s families, celebrated milestones together, and went on vacation weekends together.

What was to Carlisle only a death, regrettable but ultimately impersonal, was to these people a deeply personal loss and trauma they would always carry with them. Carlisle was an outsider to this group in ways completely unrelated to vampirism.

He felt uncomfortably voyeuristic as he sat there among the mourners.

What he said was, «I’m so sorry,» as he lightly squeezed Dr. Mehdi’s sleeved wrist, taking the usual care to avoid skin contact.

Conversation didn’t so much resume so much as it lagged along in jumps and awkward halts as the people around the table tried to make their situation less surreal. For once, Carlisle’s failure to eat didn’t make him stick out.

Carlisle’s mind wandered away from the table. He couldn’t figure out why Alice hadn’t called.

It was possible that she simply hadn’t received the vision. If her focus were elsewhere, if Aro’s decision had been so inoffensive that it somehow hadn’t registered… it sounded unlikely even as he contemplated it.

No, Alice had to have received that vision.

So why hadn’t she called?

Assuming the worst, that something had happened to her, it was extremely unlikely that his entire family had been rendered incommunicado at once. Even if Alice had wandered off with Edward and Bella, as she was wont to do these days, and something had befallen all three, Carlisle would have known by now. His family never strayed far from one another during a hunt, they’d be apart for a few hours, but weekend hunts like these were primarily family events. There would be breaks to talk, play games, or just goof around. 

Someone would have noticed by now if something had happened.

Perhaps she was trying to scatter the family to the winds, and wanted Carlisle to stay in Whitefish where he would be under the radar. How this would work when Carlisle was scheduled to return Sunday was beyond him. The whole thing was too contrived to hold water, and Carlisle dismissed this theory as well.

Perhaps she didn’t want to worry him. However, that would be extremely out of character. Alice was never afraid to tell people the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

Perhaps if she thought they were all going to die anyway, she wanted to spare Carlisle for as long as she could. Perhaps Edward had asked it of her. It would be a very Edward thing to ask. Edward tended to believe he knew the wellbeing of his loved ones better than they did, and he would rather shoulder their anger after than have them suffer in the moment. It was a misplaced nobility, and if this was the reason Alice hadn’t called, it couldn’t have been more misplaced. However, if Edward and Alice didn’t tell Carlisle, then Rosalie would come through. So his family shielding him couldn’t be it either. Carlisle frowned as his mind continued to sift through the possibilities.

Perhaps Aro had been lying about his decision. Carlisle couldn’t figure out what motive Aro would have, or what alternate decision he might have made. the only advantage Carlisle could see would be if Alice phoned Carlisle to say «Dear god, the Volturi are coming to kill us all!» and Carlisle replied «No worries, Aro’s just doing me a solid,» and then the Volturi did indeed come to kill them all. In funny hats. But for all his lack of trust in Aro, this didn’t sound right to Carlisle either. It was too contrived, and there would be no time for the Cullens to gather any allies anyway. There was no need for Aro to come up with this scheme. No, Aro’s decision had been genuine.

Another alternative, one that would be in-character, was that Alice had somehow missed this vision. Carlisle wouldn’t pretend to understand her gift well enough to say for sure that that hadn’t happened. It wouldn’t be the first time Alice had missed something big. Perhaps the fact that Aro’s decision had been artificial, so to say, had muddied the waters. Still, that didn’t feel right either, Aro knew her gift better than Carlisle did and should be able to trigger a vision quite easily.

Or perhaps she was being blocked.

Renesmée would be spending the weekend visiting Charlie, but plans could have changed after Carlisle left. Perhaps she’d gone with the family. In that case, she’d be with Bella, and Bella usually hunted with Alice…

The other alternative, that something had in fact happened to the whole family, he resolutely steered his mind away from that. That was not an option.

Renesmée, then. Carlisle was not happy to be involving her. Renesmée was a peculiar girl, prone to the strangest opinions and actions. More, to Renesmée, the Volturi were bogeymen who tried to kill her when she was a baby, and she had since grown up hearing all sorts of scary stories from Edward and the Denali. She had every reason to be fearful of them. She would be terrified to learn Carlisle had summoned them.

Carlisle’s lips curled into a grimace as he realized that if she picked up the phone, he would have to keep it from her.

She’d be furious with him, but the Lord only knew what she might do otherwise. He’d have to tell her only about the werewolves and then elaborate about the Volturi when his family showed up in person.

God, he hated playing so dirty.

But there was nothing else to it, not if he wanted to avoid things to get hairier than they already were. Renesmée would probably eat one of his things in revenge (god, how had she still not outgrown that?).

Carlisle fished his phone out of his pocket and quickly texted her. _Call me now. Important._

«Hey Cullen, is that a Nokia?»

He looked up to see Dr. Mehdi staring at him with wide eyes. Carlisle smiled quickly. «I’m not a smartphone person.»

«So your kids have Teslas, you’re wearing Prada right now, but a phone is too fancy for you?»

«It’s just Edward with the Tesla, and… yes?» Carlisle shrugged, pocketing it again.

Dr. Mehdi stared back at him.

This was why spending more time with humans was bad for blending in.

Opposite them on the table, Dr. Brewer’s lip quivered. «Sean had just bought a new phone for his daughter. For Christmas. Fuck,» he broke off, turning his face away.

The whole table shuddered, Carlisle guiltily tried not to feel too relieved at the attention being off of him.

As silence descended upon the humans, Carlile’s mind drifted back to the night’s conversation with Aro, as it had several times already.

Aro had been unmistakably guarded at the beginning. He’d warmed as the conversation went on, but in the beginning he’d been… expectant. Happy enough to hear from him, but reserving his response for whatever Carlisle said next. He’d been on edge.

It was a far cry from what he was used to from Aro.

Even when Carlisle was still new to Volterra, Aro had been easy to read. The man could barrel through mood swings faster than anyone Carlisle had ever met, and he was no stranger to neurotic humors. However, Carlisle had never known him to be cautious the way he’d been at the beginning of that phone call.

That _but I’m glad you called_ he’d tacked on at the end of his warning about the Children of the Moon had been so strange too, Carlisle couldn’t imagine Aro saying that under normal circumstances.

He supposed it all came back to the fact that they could no longer call each other friends. 

_I doubt this is a social call._

When Carlisle called, Aro had answered a potential enemy.

It was to be expected, Carlisle would certainly have assumed the worst if it had been Aro who called him out of the blue, but it stung all the same.

It stood in stark contrast to their last call, when Carlisle called to thank Aro for giving Edward clemency.

Carlisle had barely made it through introducing himself to the secretary before Aro had relieved her of the phone. «My _dear_ Carlisle, what a delight!» he’d exclaimed.

Carlisle had grinned at the sound of his oldest friend’s voice. «Aro. It’s been too long,»

«Hold on one moment,» Aro had said, and a few seconds had passed as Aro presumably relocated to someplace more private.

That fact alone, that Aro then had taken for granted that they were about to have a private conversation, was now another reminder of the confidence that was lost.

«Alright,» Aro had said when he was at last someplace private. Carlisle’s eyebrows had risen. It had been strange enough to hear Aro speak modern English, strange as well to be speaking modern English with Aro, but something about the word _alright_ was so firmly rooted in modernity to Carlisle. It was not a word he should be hearing in Aro’s voice at all.

But then, as Aro had added, «we can talk,» Carlisle had concluded that the English language as a whole simply did not sound right coming from Aro. He might have been a seventeenth century priest talking on the phone, but some things were too anachronistic even for him.

Blinking those thoughts away, Carlisle had gazed up at the painting Aro had gifted him all those years ago with a fond smile. «First off, I have to thank you for what you did for Edward, for Bella as well. Words can’t even-» he cut himself off briefly, before his throat closed on him. «I can’t ever repay you,» he’d finished.

He would have gone on praising Aro too, but in Volterra he had always let Aro see his appreciation by touch, rarely verbalizing his deeper thoughts and feelings. This was a different matter, but their dynamic was what it was, and it would have felt contrived to start putting words to it now.

Besides, Aro eventually knew Carlisle well enough that he didn’t need to read his mind to know, and Carlisle doubted this would be an exception. 

«Oh, no, no, no, let’s have none of that!» Aro had replied warmly. «The law is in place for all our protection, not to harshly sentence people regardless of context.»

(Well, that hadn’t worked out for Bree Tanner, had it?)

Aro had paused then, the first sign of his unease that day. But Carlisle hadn’t paid any heed to that, continuing, «All the same you have my everlasting gratitude.»

Aro had huffed quietly, Carlisle imagined there had been a smile on his face. «I’m glad,» he’d said.

And Carlisle had heard it clearly then, that note of something other in Aro’s voice, an echo of something not glad at all.

Carlisle’s brow had furrowed, his eyes scrutinizing Aro’s painted visage before him. Like if he stared intently enough, those centuries-old strokes would help him decipher Aro’s strange mood.

(He cared greatly for that painting, even now. Without word or sound it so succinctly captured the drama and opulence of the Volturi. It was and it wasn’t in the material things depicted, in the humans roiling in that chaotic dance so characteristic in Baroque paintings, and the immortals looking down from above, aloof and unchanging. All the same, Carlisle enjoyed the painting for the little things tucked away between paint strokes. Perhaps some of the vampires depicted had leaked into the painting itself, for there was something otherworldly to it, a timeless, ethereal atmosphere that made the Baroque setting just that, a setting. It could have been medieval, realistic, post-modern even, and yet it wouldn’t have changed. No matter the stage, Hamlet is always Hamlet. In that same way, the very raison d’être behind the Volturi was put on display here. Separate from humans, observing their mayfly lives, their silent watch the only constant in this ever changing civilization.

Carlisle would never say as much to Amun, but if vampires were to liken themselves to gods, then the Volturi, clandestine sovereigns that they were, made a far better job of it than the Egyptian coven ever had. He half-wondered with a hint of a smile if it was the Christian in him, preferring unseen authorities to out in the open superhumans.)

«I also thought I should tell you that Bella will be one of us quite soon,» Carlisle had added, «we’ll wait until after her graduation, to make it easier for her to disappear, but that’s only a couple of months away.» Well, they would most likely dawdle another month or so as Bella applied for an overseas internship or something along those lines, but he hadn’t been about to bore Aro with details that hadn’t even been discussed yet.

Of course, in retrospect Bella and Edward had decided to very publicly get married and then Bella simply ghosted on her human life, but that was neither here nor there.

«Excellent, excellent…» Aro had said, though he sounded like his mind was someplace entirely different. Carlisle recalled frowning before Aro continued, «Might I inquire as to who will be turning her?»

«I offered,» Carlisle had replied, «though she wants Edward to do it. Alice threw her hat in the ring, but I’m not sure how serious that is… Edward is ambivalent, but if he ends up not risking it, I’m stepping in.» Carlisle shook his head at himself, Aro hardly needed all the details.

«Yes…» Aro had said, and there it had been again, that hesitance. More than hesitance: there was something brittle about it, like thin ice about to be stepped on.

«Aro,» Carlisle had finally said, after a moment’s silence between them, «is there something on your mind?»

Aro hadn’t said anything for several full seconds, confirming it. Carlisle’s eyes had widened. «Aro, what-» he’d begun, but he’d been cut off.

«You know how my gift has- it has its downsides?» Aro had said quickly.

Carlisle had leaned back into his chair, sparing a moment to note that he hadn’t even realized he’d moved so far forwards. «Yes,» he’d replied, not sure where Aro was headed.

«And you know that as human beings, we inevitably present ourselves in one way or another. We are fathers, brothers, friends, lovers - to be one person in a given context and another in a different setting is not deception, but all the same…»

«All the same we can’t know more of a person than what they allow us to see,» Carlisle finished. 

(Aro had spoken of this in Volterra as well. In those early days, when Carlisle was still digesting the implications of Aro’s gift, Aro had found a rather unusual way to explain how it worked.

Most gifted vampires that Carlisle had since met who wanted to explain their gift did so in a purely practical manner - what their gift was, how it worked, and, if they trusted him, where its limitations lay.

Aro chose a philosophical approach.

To him, his gift was divine, or as divine as anything could be to an unapologetic atheist like Aro. After years of Carlisle pestering him, he’d agreed a divine creator wasn’t impossible either, but even that had been a purely deist admission. Still, when it came to his own gift, Aro did not see it as a superpower or a gimmick the way most of their kind had come to see gifts, but as a divine gift.

Carlisle didn’t know the details of Aro’s turning, but he knew that without his gift, manifesting even in those early, mortal days, Aro would have died human. From there, Aro’s gift had gone on to make him, it defined and moulded him until his very being was inseparable from that gift.

And each time he touched a person, everything they had ever been became an irrevocable part of him.

«I often wonder how much of who I am, is truly me,» Aro had once said, in a quiet moment after they had been together, «how can it be?» He’d frowned at the ceiling. «I suppose that is what it means to be me.» 

Aro’s gift let him see everything a person was, all they had ever been and would ever be. He instantly knew every single person he touched better than anybody else ever could. It brought him closer to everyone than anyone else ever could be, but it also put him apart from all the world. He could never truly interact with others like all the rest of the world did, always knowing them too intimately, and yet seeing through their eyes what they were like. He had an all-seeing eye, but he could never truly step into this world everyone else inhabited so naturally.

Carlisle’s awe had turned to something akin to pity once he realized just how lonely Aro’s gift was.

But Aro far from complained.

Without his gift he would not be who he was, and so wishing it otherwise was out of the question. So Aro grinned, and gave himself over to it entirely. His gift was simply how he related to the outside world, knowing the depths and extents of a person’s soul as normal to him as being able to see their face was to Carlisle.

It made him wonder how Aro saw Bella. He strongly doubted that Aro saw a reprieve in her, the way Edward did. To Edward, Bella represented blissful silence, company without the constant onslaught of consciousness. To Aro, however, Carlisle imagined Bella was a faceless woman. Unknowable, unfathomable, closer to Schrödinger’s infamous cat than a real person. A hollow woman, who walked and talked as well as anybody else, but touch her and in place of a soul, Aro would see nothing at all.

Carlisle wondered if he found her unsettling.)

As Aro had steered their conversation towards the ups and downs of his gift, Carlisle had been completely at a loss as to where he was headed.

«While I see it all,» Aro had finished quietly.

Carlisle’s mouth had tightened as he realized what Aro was getting at.

«You saw something,» he’d murmured, his brow furrowing again. Aro could only have meant Alice and Edward, but Carlisle had been at a complete loss as to what Aro could have been referring to.

Aro had hesitated, giving Carlisle an odd conviction that Aro was biting his lip. «There’s no easy way to say this,» he had finally rushed, each word laced with doubt and uncertainty. Carlisle had felt his stomach tighten into a knot at Aro’s words as he’d found himself with a sudden, deep dread of whatever words Aro would say next.

«Your son Edward is not as he seems,» Aro had finally said. The way he had said it, nearly dryly, like this was a gross understatement he was trying to wrangle into a neutral observation.

Carlisle’s brows had risen. «Edward?» he’d echoed.

«His mind is… unique. And not, I fear, in a good way.» Aro had paused then, seemingly gathering courage, before he rushed through the next words, «What he presents, what he wants to be, is completely at odds with what he is. His relationship with young Bella… he’ll never turn her.» He’d cut himself off again, like there was more he could say but wouldn’t.

Carlisle had sat there in his chair, utterly lost. «Aro, I… what are you saying?»

«I’m saying, Carlisle… be mindful. Especially regarding the girl.»

Several long seconds passed as Carlisle took in Aro’s words, turned them over, and looked at them again as if replaying them in his mind would give them different meaning. «Are you going to be more specific?» he’d finally asked in a quiet voice.

Aro had sighed on his end of the phone. «He doesn’t love her.» 

A shocked laugh had spilled from Carlisle’s lips. «What?» he’d exclaimed. «He tried to kill himself over her, how can you even-»

Aro had sighed. «He’s- complicated. And the girl is only a part of it. Carlisle, promise me you’ll be mindful.»

Carlisle had shaken his head resolutely. «I respect your opinion Aro,» he’d said firmly, «but this is a bit- radical. I don’t believe it,» he’d concluded.

«I knew you wouldn’t,» Aro had replied, his voice too humorless to be wry, «but keep my words in mind.»

The phone call had ended soon after that.

Carlisle had been left staring up at that old painting, his mood somber as he felt that seed of doubt Aro had sown burrow into his heart.

For months after, he’d kept watching Edward, watching Edward with Bella, looking for any sign of what Aro had been getting at. He never saw a trace of it, and when the day came, Edward turned her.

And then had come the realization that Aro might have lied.

«Cullen, you okay?» Dr. Mehdi was staring straight at Carlisle.

Carlisle turned towards him and flashed a quick smile. Dr. Mehdi’s eyes widened, and he recoiled. Too quick, Carlisle realized, faintly surprised that he’d slipped in such a stupid manner. When had he last made a mistake like that? Once again he found himself questioning how on earth Alice had thought that sending him to blend in with the humans for three days had been a good idea. Of course, she couldn’t have known the weekend would turn into a horror movie, but all the same-

Carlisle smiled again, trying to put as much reassurance into it as he could. Dr. Mehdi relaxed.

«Just lost in thought,» Carlisle said.

Dr. Mehdi nodded. «You looked a bit funny for a moment there. And say, do you wanna carpool back? Jenna, Pedro, and I are leaving now after breakfast, we just wanna get home…»

He shot a look at Carlisle and added, almost apologetically, «since you’ve been drinking. Last night, I mean,» he looked pointedly into Carlisle’s red eyes.

Carlisle wondered if he was really that unapproachable, that the humans felt the need to explain themselves for offering to carpool. They had certainly been incredulous when he said he would join them in Whitefish. He almost felt bad about declining. However, he had to get back as soon as possible, and he doubted his colleagues would appreciate Carlisle breaking every traffic rule in the book and then parking his car in the woods to go search for his children.

Just then, Dr. Brewer’s phone rang. He looked down and frowned. «It’s the sheriff,» he said, and picked it up. «Dr. John Brewer,» he said.

«Sheriff Frasier, you remember me,» a gruff male voice replied. «Anyone in your party leave town yet?»

Dr. Brewer frowned. «Some are about to, but not yet, no. Why do you ask?»

The sheriff grunted. «Hm. Well, I’m going to have to ask you to come and bring your colleagues down to the station. Immediately.»

Carlisle’s stomach turned to ice while Dr. Brewer’s mouth opened in protest. «What do you mean, come to the station? You questioned us last night already, I hardly think-»

«We’ve found another body,» the sheriff interrupted in a tone that brokered no argument. «We’re going to need the people who were in the area to come in.» He did not elaborate any further, but Carlisle knew.

They had found the Child of the Moon.

It couldn’t be anybody else. Carlisle would have smelled it if there was another body nearby.

And it would be clear from the effort taken to hide the body that no animal had done it.

As Dr. Brewer sat in stunned silence and the other humans around the table asked what the sheriff had said, Carlisle could only curse his family for none of them picking up that damn phone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Carlisle pretends to eat breakfast and overanalyzes a phone call with his ex. I wish I had thought of doing chapter summaries for this fic, because this would be a great one.
> 
> Thanks as always to the wonderful The Carnivorous Muffin for being a wonderful beta.


	4. Chapter 4

«Dr…» the officer looked down on her slip of paper again and frowned. «Car-lizzl Cullen.»

It was his turn, then. Carlisle rose from his chair and smiled at the officer, who drew in a sharp, audible gasp as she took in Carlisle’s face.

«Through there?» Carlisle asked pleasantly as if the officer wasn’t gaping at him, gesturing towards the door behind the woman.

The officer nodded, looking like she was at a loss for words. Her eyes widened further as she made proper eye contact and noticed Carlisle’s violently red eyes.

Carlisle just smiled reassuringly, and stepped gracefully past the officer, pushing the door open as he walked into the interrogation room. The officer followed him inside.

Two of his colleagues had already been questioned, they seemed to be doing so in no particular order. The questions had been inoffensive too, so it sounded to Carlisle like the police were simply gathering information, any information, in the hopes of piecing together what had happened the night before.

The interrogation room was a very plain room, with a cheap table better suited for a cafeteria and four chairs around it. The sheriff was sat on one end, and the officer who’d fetched Carlisle walked around the table to sit next to him. The officer gestured politely towards one of the two remaining chairs, still a bit muted as she looked at his face. It was a look he had gotten very used to from humans, that incredulous look of  _ is this guy even real? _

Carlisle took his seat opposite them, and smiled politely up at the sheriff. The sheriff looked a bit dazed as well. The man had seen him the night before, but Carlisle supposed it had been dark, and he’d had more pressing matters on his mind.

«I’m Dr. Carlisle Cullen, I understand you have some questions for me?» Carlisle asked pleasantly.

The sheriff nodded, finally snapping to. «Yes,» he said, clearing his throat, putting a small device on the table. «Hope you don’t mind,» he said in a way that wasn’t asking permission as he started pressed a button. A recorder, Carlisle recognized.

Carlisle minded very much, but he smiled pleasantly, making his smile just brilliant enough that both humans lost their thread of thought again. Being a vampire had its perks when one was feeling petty. «Not a problem,» he said.

It was a shame he wouldn’t get away with faking a softer, more human voice. His voice was as inhuman as his appearance, perhaps even more so. It was too sharp, too clear, not at all softened by human tissue as it passed his vocal cords of stone. It was a voice like the sound of a finger along the rim of a wine glass, that chiming, eerie, otherworldly tone that always echoes through the room. 

Nothing human could make a sound like that.

It was one of those things that Carlisle could get away with in person, when the humans could see the face that voice was coming from (not that the face helped much with making him appear human, but it distracted from the voice) and be reassured that they were talking to a real person, but they were always creeped out when he spoke on the phone.

Carlisle would just have to hope for the best.

«Interview with Dr. Carlisle Cullen, December 14th, 2019, it’s 10:15 AM. Conducted by sheriff Frasier and officer Lewis,» the sheriff drawled for the recorder.

Carlisle hoped he looked more relaxed than he felt.

«Alright, Dr. Cullen,» the sheriff began, looking down in his notebook, «could you tell me about your movements last night?»

Carlisle frowned. «The whole night?»

«If you don’t mind.»

Carlisle pursed his lips. «I was designated cook for the first dinner, so I went straight for the kitchen when we arrived. That was at five PM. Dr. Milton cooked as well, we were done at around six. We talked quite a bit- at dinner, I mean - so we weren’t done until closer to eight. I volunteered for the dishes, I’m a bit of a germ freak so I like to do it myself…»

The sheriff’s eyes had glazed over slightly, and Carlisle held back a small smile as he continued, «We then mingled, I played cards with Drs. Wayne and Graham for about twenty minutes - go fish - but I just kept winning, so they ditched me.» He shrugged lightly. «Apart from that I wasn’t really around Dr. Wayne, he’s a gastroenterologist and I’m a neurosurgeon, so we’ve never worked together…» he trailed off with his lips pursed together.

The sheriff nodded. «I understand you’re new at the hospital.»

Carlisle laughed, making the sound as inviting as he could. It always helped with making people, vampire and human alike, relax around him. «It’s been two years, actually, but in a small town like ours I’m still new. That’s actually why I came along on the trip. Socialize a bit.»

The sheriff huffed a little laugh of his own, «I’ve been here fifteen years, but I’m still a newcomer in all the ways that count.»

Carlisle grinned, oh how he knew that life. «Once a newcomer, always a newcomer.»

The sheriff nodded enthusiastically.

«I think you’ve blended in quite well, sir,» the officer told the sheriff in a timid voice.

Carlisle and the sheriff shared a knowing glance before the sheriff, still grinning, said, «We should maybe get back to the…»

Carlisle nodded. «What I was doing that night,» he finished. «Well, I mingled, honestly, but I got pretty tired so eventually I sat down on the couch, ready to call it a night. Dr. Milton joined me briefly but she fell asleep, so I went to speak to Dr. Mehdi for a bit. After that I figured I’d retire, so I went back to my room. A few minutes later- well. You know the rest.»

The sheriff nodded. He seemed to like Carlisle well enough, there was no indication he suspected Carlisle had left anything out. Still, Carlisle would have given a lot to have Edward listening in, whispering advice.

«Can you tell me everything you noticed about Dr. Wayne that night?» the sheriff asked. «And I do mean everything,» he added, wagging a thick finger.

Now for the real acting.

Carlisle frowned. «Am I allowed to ask why…»

The sheriff lowered his voice. «We have reason to believe it might not have been an animal,» he said.

The officer gave him a quick look. «Sheriff, we were told not to…»

Carlisle, meanwhile feigned shock. His widened his eyes and looked at the sheriff incredulously. «What do you mean, it wasn’t an animal? How? The man was…» he broke off, looking between the two.

There wasn’t a trace of doubt on their faces.

There was grim acceptance, disgust, but not doubt.

Carlisle knew nothing about Dr. Wayne’s death had borne a trace of human interference, which could only mean the werewolf’s body made them certain in their case.

He’d bitten the wolf, he realized, the police would have found blood from the John Doe a few feet from Dr. Wayne, and Dr. Wayne’s blood all over the John Doe, tying the two victims together quite effectively. Well, that was assuming they had analyzed the blood yet, but they would soon enough.

At this early point, the connection between the two victims had more likely been made by the fact that two people were found mauled with extreme force, partially eaten, in the same area, in one night.

He did wonder what those poor policemen had made of the mystery so far. One man mauled with inexplicable force in minutes, just outside a cabin filled with witnesses who hadn’t heard a thing, another body found mauled by a similar yet different force several miles away from it all, with clear signs of human interference, and the murder scene in another location entirely. And no trails between the three spots, not even any footsteps. Carlisle had been running much too quickly for that.

It was Sherlock Holmes, rated R.

The sheriff gave Carlisle a small nod. «Did Dr. Wayne, or any of your other colleagues act unusual in any way, or was there anything out of the ordinary?»

Carlisle could answer that one honestly. «I wouldn’t know, sheriff. I don’t really know these people, especially not Dr. Wayne. Yesterday was the first time I’d spoken more than a few words to him,» he said, and smiled, a bit apologetically. «All I can say is that everything and everybody seemed normal to me.»

The sheriff nodded. «How about this morning?»

Carlisle blinked in surprise. «What about this morning?»

«Any particular behavior, anything unusual…»

Carlisle raised an eyebrow at him. «A years-long friend of these people just died, in a singularly brutal manner at that, and we all saw the body. It was traumatizing. I daresay normal behavior would be extremely unusual.»

His face was quite calm, revealing not a trace of his inner turmoil, his eyes sharp and piercing as he somewhat caustically defended his colleagues.

His mind, on the other hand…

Nevermind Carlisle’s personal safety, nevermind keeping the secret, this could ruin the lives of his colleagues. Would, quite likely. This case wouldn’t be solved, not unless the sheriff somehow found out about the supernatural. No, they would go home, knowing that something dark and unspeakable had been done by a human hand to their cherished friend and another person, and the town would never let them forget. Suspicion would corrupt what was supposed to be a time of mourning, turning their trauma into a lifelong burden.

As for the impossible nature of the case…

The Volturi would not take kindly to that.

Dear Lord, the Volturi.

How come the one time in nearly four hundred years that Carlisle called upon the Volturi, he ended up accidentally calling them upon himself?

Because they would come, and Aro would see that Carlisle had left ends loose all over the place with that Child of the Moon, and gotten caught up in the middle of a double homicide investigation where the only possible answer would be supernatural interference.

Damnit.

He found himself glad his family hadn’t shown up after all, at least this mess would be his alone.

Still -  _ damnit _ .

And he couldn’t think of a way to even begin solving any of these problems.

The sheriff, oblivious to Carlisle’s rising horror, nodded as he took in his words. «Yes, yes, quite right. But you understand that I had to ask,» he said.

Carlisle nodded, silently amazed that he was still keeping it together. «Of course.»

The sheriff nodded again. «Anything else you’d like to add?»

Carlisle shook his head. «No,» he said.

«Alright,» the sheriff said. «That’ll be all, then. Although I have to ask, what’s up with the eyes?»

Carlisle huffed, a bit self-consciously. «I drank last night.»

The sheriff didn’t even blink at that paper thin explanation, he just grinned. «What’d you drink, glowsticks? Lava lamp?»

Carlisle just laughed. The sheriff joined him.

«Am I excused, then?» Carlisle asked, still smiling.

«Yes,» the sheriff said, at the same time as his officer said, «No.»

Carlisle’s eyebrows rose as he looked at the officer, who blushed at the attention. «Y-y-you’re supposed to, um,» she seemed to lose her train of thought.

«Oh, yes,» the sheriff said. «I completely forgot. If you could report to the lab, we’re taking fingerprints, and blood samples. If you could have your dentist fax us your dental records as well. Just to rule things out,» he said.

Oh no, Carlisle thought. Oh god.

Oh god oh god oh god.

He smiled, aware that he was standing unnaturally still. The smile came out much too brilliant, more Norman Rockwell than anything reassuring. «I’m going to have to decline.» His voice came out much too sharp, ringing through the room,  _ damnit _ .

The sheriff blinked. «Refuse to do a blood sample?»

«Yes,» Carlisle deadpanned. «And I’ll be refusing the other two as well.»

The sheriff frowned. «We weren’t actually asking, Dr. Cullen, collecting these samples are part of the investigation. If you refuse, we’ll get a warrant first thing on Monday.»

Today was Saturday.

Carlisle pressed his lips together, and there was genuine apology in his voice when he replied, «Until then.»

«Anything else?» he asked.

The officer blinked, still shocked by Carlisle’s refusal. «Well - yes, actually - we were wondering if you had any pictures from the party, any recordings…»

Carlisle pulled the Nokia up from his pocket and smiled. «No mobile camera, I’m afraid.»

Both humans were just gaping at him now.

«I’m a bit of a technophobe,» he added.

«I see,» the sheriff finally said.

Carlisle smiled at them both, and their frowns eased somewhat. «Was there anything else?» He asked again, trying to sound more soothing again.

He almost expected them to come out and ask if he did it.

«No,» the sheriff replied, appearing more at ease. He gave Carlisle a quick smile. «That will be it.»

Carlisle left the room, and went straight back to the nearest chair outside.

«Aren’t you going to the lab?» Dr. Milton asked, a frown on her face as she watched him.

«No,» Carlisle said simply, picking up a magazine.

Dr. Gibbons was the one being interviewed now.

The man answered much as Carlisle had, he’d had a normal night and didn’t notice anything amiss, although Carlisle gnashed his teeth when the sheriff asked about anything about the weekend being out of the ordinary, and Dr. Gibbons, without missing a beat, replied «Cullen came.»

«What do you mean?» the sheriff asked, and judging by his heartbeat increasing in frequency, Dr. Gibbons had his interest.

«It’s not really that he’s the new guy, although he’s not that new… it’s more the guy, you know? I really like him, everyone does, but he’s been completely uninterested in anything social. Not even Christmas parties. Then suddenly he comes along for this trip, it’s great, we’ve all been dying of curiosity about the guy, but… it was a bit weird.»

Carlisle was never, ever, not ever, taking advice from Alice ever again.

«I do like him, he’s great,» Dr. Gibbons hurried to reassure his two interrogators, seeming to realize that he had just made Carlisle sound extremely shady.

Carlisle heard the sheriff hum in agreement. «He’s a very pleasant man.»

A beat.

«Is there anything you’d like to add about Dr. Cullen..?» Lewis’ quiet voice piped up.

Dr. Gibbons hmm-ed. «Well… this is neither here nor there, but his kids are weird. Uh, he has seven, I think, they’re all teens. Some are adults, I think. Adopted. I think the two blondes might be his younger siblings, and the gingers are related to his wife somehow. Oh, that’s another thing, he’s been here for two years, but we never see his wife. Not ever, I don’t even know what she looks like. It’s a running joke at work,» his voice warmed into a chuckle at the end there.

How was it possible that Carlisle was doing worse in Dr. Gibbons’ interrogation than in his own?

«Running joke?» he could hear the frown in Lewis’ voice as she asked.

«Oh, it’s silly…» Dr. Gibbons trailed off, but after a moment, Carlisle presumed he’d received some nonverbal encouragement, he continued hesitantly. «So, all of Cullen’s kids are attractive, and I mean out of this world attractive. They’re on Cullen’s level, even the anorexic pixie cut girl. So we figured, maybe his wife is merely supermodel hot, and so they’re all too ashamed of her to let her out in public… It’s funnier if you’ve seen these people,» he concluded sheepishly. 

«No, I can imagine, actually,» the sheriff replied, and Carlisle remembered how the man had gawked when he laid eyes on Carlisle.

Carlisle wondered, on a scale ranging from dead to dead, just how dead he would be when the Volturi arrived.

Dr. Gibbons’ interrogation ended smoothly. He agreed to the blood and print samples like it was the most natural thing in the world, which it was.

After that the sheriff asked all the interviewees about Carlisle, and they all agreed it was strange he’d come, every one of them noting that he was easily the local eccentric. None of them objected to any of the sheriff’s requests.

As Dr. Graham leaned in towards Dr. Milton and whispered, «Did he ask you about Cullen too?», Carlisle felt the mood change in the station change.

Now, he was getting looks.

Subtle, quick looks, and there was a shift around Carlisle from companionable silence, to the others actively not talking to him.

Finally, Dr. Barris returned from the lab, and Lewis reappeared to ask everyone to write down their contact information on a slip of paper. Carlisle made a point of filling out every field, even the one requesting a second phone number. He gave Alice’s, she’d know what to say.

If she picked up, that was.

«Uh, Cullen…» Dr. Milton trotted alongside him as he made his way across the room to the coat rack, where he’d hung his bag.

«Yes?» he asked as he started pulling his clothes out.

She wet her lips nervously. «Why didn’t you go to the lab?»

Carlisle wrapped a thick scarf around his neck, pulling it up to cover his nose. «I declined,» he said perfectly casually, like he’d done the most natural thing in the world.

Dr. Milton frowned, but let it go. She watched in fascination as Carlisle put on thick ski goggles over the upper half of his face, pulled his hat down over his hair as far as it would go, then a thick set of mittens, then gloves over the mittens, and finally a thick coat that zipped all the way up to just beneath his eyes. His legs were already covered by two layers of stockings and thick cord pants, and high boots. He finished the look by pulling up the coat’s hood and drawing the cord as tightly as it would go, rendering the arctic explorer look complete.

It wasn’t quite sunny outside, but the weather was ambiguous. With his luck so far this weekend and the Volturi on the way, Carlisle was going to be very safe rather than sorry.

«He did this at the hotel too, when we were coming here,» he heard Dr. Milton explain awkwardly, and he turned to see half the station, officer Lewis and the sheriff among them, staring in amazement.

«It’s sixty degrees out there,» an officer said in quiet amazement.

«I take sun damage extremely seriously,» Carlisle enunciated through the multiple layers of fabric, shrugged, waved, and left.

«You should meet his kids,» he heard Dr. Brewer tell someone the second the door fell shut behind him.

* * *

Carlisle found himself a café not far from the station, and ordered a coffee he wouldn’t drink.

He’d considered listening in on the police station, under normal circumstances he would have. But Aro was on his way, and the ancient vampire was nothing if not thorough in situations such as these, claiming to have touched entire cities at times to ensure the secret was well protected. He would not so much as blink at one small town police station, and soon have far more intel than Carlisle could ever hope to get.

And besides that, what was there to do?

Running away screaming from Whitefish was very tempting, but topping a case like this off with a mystery disappearance would only garner more attention. The feds would get involved, if they weren’t already. They would search the world for Carlisle, his family would have to hide for decades. Records of his time in Forks would be pulled up, countless other places if they continued looking, and all of the family’s records would fall like domino pieces. 

He couldn’t do that.

He could fake his death. That was better, they would have no one to search for, but they might still look into him. And they would want to get in touch with his family, only to find that no one in a family of eight was picking up the phone. The local police force would be dispatched to visit the house, and, well, Carlisle could only begin to imagine all the things that could go wrong, starting with the authentic ancient Egyptian sarcophagus of solid gold in the attic.

Third option, stick around, and then… well, run away screaming on Monday, unless he managed to hack up some werewolf blood into a vial. He doubted that would go over well with the technician, though.

Or maybe-

Renesmée’s number was dialled before he’d even finished the thought.

With her gift, she could convince the lab technician that he had taken samples off of Carlisle, and they could switch out the samples with an unrelated human’s instead. The risk was sky high, and the Lord only knew what kind of weird easter eggs she’d sneak into the poor lab technician’s consciousness, but the other option he had was faking his own death.

Which just meant it was too bad that Renesmée wasn’t picking up. She hadn’t answered his text either. Carlisle resisted the bizarre urge to bite his phone.

Zafrina was too far away and didn’t have a phone, or he would have asked her. Her illusions worked remotely, too, she’d be better than Renesmée.

He let his attention wander away from his thoughts, focusing on his surroundings instead.

His phone buzzed, and Carlisle almost forgot he was in public and restricted to human speed as he rushed to pick it up. He didn’t even look at the number. «Yes?» he said breathlessly.

«Is this doctor Carli-ley Cullen?» a male, human voice inquired on the other end.

Carlisle’s heart sank. «Yes,» he confirmed, glad his voice at least was steady.

«I’m agent Westley, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’m calling to let you know we’ll be taking over the case involving Dr. Wayne’s death, and as you are one of the only witnesses to this case, we’d like to schedule an interview with you as soon as possible.»

Carlisle was starting to regret not biting that phone.

«Of course,» he said pleasantly. It wasn’t like he could refuse. Or could he? «How about tomorrow?»

«We were actually hoping to speak with you today.»

Not with the Volturi arriving any moment and Carlisle’s family incommunicado, that could only become a trainwreck. No, better to buy time to form a battle plan.

A battle plan that was most likely going to be «Oh no, Dr. Cullen fell into a river and died!», but better than nothing.

«I’m going to have to insist on tomorrow,» Carlisle said politely, but firmly.

The agent wasn’t to be deterred. «Why is that, exactly?»

«Personal reasons,» Carlisle replied, wondering if he could possibly make himself any more suspicious. Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of a way to be less suspicious either.

At least the way this was going his colleagues wouldn’t have to worry about the shadow of suspicion hanging over them all their lives. That shadow was pretty concentrated on Carlisle.

«I see,» the agent said. «Ten PM, then. At the station.»

«Sure!» Carlisle said, way too upbeat. He cringed at the sound of it.

«…sure,» the agent said, and hung up.

Carlisle put his phone down on the table, pushed the coffee out of the way, and let his head fall on the table. It did nothing for him the way he imagined it gave humans a moment’s respite, but it was nice.

Children of the Moon, Volturi incoming, his family incommunicado, a federal investigation starring Carlisle as the only suspect. All in the space of less than twelve hours, and no sign of slowing down.

How had it all spiralled out of control so quickly?

The phone buzzed again. Carlisle wondered if it was a newborn army letting him know they were planning a rave party in Whitefish that weekend.

It was a text message from Aro. «Just arrived in Billings. ETA twelve thirty.»

Carlisle gaped.

How could the Volturi possibly have been that fast? It had been eleven hours since Carlisle called, they should still be in the air. He was begrudgingly impressed by their efficiency. He wasn’t sure even Alice could have managed the trip that quickly.

The absurdity of seeing Aro use texting abbreviations was not something Carlisle wanted to dwell on. Trust the three and a half millennia old Mycenaean to be more with it than Carlisle was. At least Aro wasn’t dropping the period at the end of his texts. Emmett, Alice, Bella and Renesmée had all adopted that habit. It was one of Carlisle’s pet peeves. 

«I’ll be there.» Carlisle texted in response, knowing there was no need for further information. Demetri would find him.

As he went back to his hotel room, discarding the arctic explorer getup, and snuck back out to find an appropriate place to meet with the Volturi, Carlisle could only hope things would start going his way soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vampire voices in canon are described as bells, wind chimes, feathers, all distinctly inhuman. When Carlisle calls Billy in "Midnight Sun", Billy who has no powers of his own is immediately creeped out by his voice: "There was something sharp and clear about it that put his back up for some reason." Alice's voice is consistently described as a thrilling, bell-like, wonderful sound.
> 
> I choose to take Meyer at her word, in fact I love this, my only question is how anybody can understand a word of what these feather wind chime bell people are saying.
> 
> As usual, my wonderful beta The Carnivorous Muffin is wonderful.


	5. Chapter 5

It had started snowing.

Thick, fluttery snowflakes drifted slowly down from the skies, appearing to change their mind about the direction every other second.

Carlisle stood perfectly still, letting them fall on him, one palm extended to catch them. He wondered how high they would pile by the time the Volturi arrived.

That had been such a shock in the early days, that snow didn’t melt on him. No, the snow covered him the same as any other statue. If he stood still in a snowstorm he could disappear entirely. In his early, more dramatic days, he’d been reminded of the lonely sight of tombstones in the winter.

That had been a lovely thought in his darkest hour, when he wanted nothing more than to be rid of his too strong, too indestructible, too powerful new body, that thought of disappearing.

Now he simply enjoyed how at one with nature he could be, sitting as still as any stone and simply observing. Memorizing each snowflake, the patterns in the wings of every insect. All the little exquisite oddities that made nature so much more perfect than anything Man could ever make, human or vampire.

This was the reason why Carlisle had never gotten into art like so many of his kinsmen had, into drawing and sculpting things on his own for the purpose of creating beauty. He would only ever be producing a less splendid approximation of the real thing, and that would bring him no satisfaction at all. Better to be outside and enjoy the Lord’s creation directly.

Even better yet, spend his time helping humans.

His lips drew downwards as he thought about how it’d be years until he could do that again. A double homicide with the feds involved like this wasn’t going to go away. Carlisle was bitterly aware of the consequences this would have not just for him, but for his entire family.

Just a few decades ago, the situation would not have been so dire. They could have left the country, settled in a nice settlement someplace far North, on the continent. Maybe laid low for a few years, just to be on the safe side, but distance would have made all the difference. Besides, it would have been nice to get a change of pace from the States. He’d missed Europe. In this, Carlisle was sometimes reminded of just how young his wife and children all were. 

With the exception of Jasper and Bella, they had been born within nineteen years of each other, and all of them in the same country. The Western World might have undergone a lot of changes over the course of the 20th century, but most of it had happened within their lifetime. Even now there were humans alive who were older than Rosalie and Emmett. And so, the society his family so zealously strove to remain a part of was theirs, in a way it had never been Carlisle’s.

Jasper was the exception, but as he had spent a near century living like an animal, blood and death his only constants in life, the total contrast modern domesticity offered to his past was therapeutic in itself. It represented peace and stability. In that, it had become normality to him as well.

Carlisle, on the other hand…

He wouldn’t be so arrogant as to claim he had seen it all, but he knew he had seen far more than most vampires. He had been a creature of the night who lurked around universities, a guest to the Volturi, a nomad seeing the world, a doctor who all but lived in the hospital, and now a family man. As the world changed, so did he, always adapting to the changing tides around him.

His lips quirked upwards as he thought about how his life could also simply be summarized as the pre- and post-Alice eras. Before she came into his life with Jasper on her arm and the future of stock markets in her mind, material wealth had to Carlisle’s coven been what a book is to a fish. They didn’t need it. But if the cars, the houses, the clothes, and the grossly overfilled bank accounts made it more fun for them to play at the human lifestyle, who was Carlisle to frown at kids these days? It wasn’t like he didn’t have countless physical reminders of the years he had lived. Vampires were not immaterial creatures.

All the same, all of that would change now.

They had known for some time now that they were living on borrowed time. Google was a nightmare by itself, but coupled with the rising sophistication of facial recognition software and the near ubiquitous cameras watching over every corner of the world, they were playing with fire. Their lifestyle of blending in with the humans would come to an end soon enough, they had even talked about it, but they’d known that once they closed that chapter, made that fateful decision to withdraw themselves entirely from society, they would have to commit.

No inhabiting houses, even if they alerted no authorities.

No cars.

None of the clothes, the grossly overfilled bank accounts - all of it, anything that the modern age could in any way trace, would have to go.

They would become nomads, like Carlisle had once been and nearly all of their friends were. They would live Spartan, sparse lives for however long it took before the current human civilization inevitably fell, as countless had before.

It was not without reason that he hadn’t questioned Alice when she told him to go blend in with the humans.

It was funny, they were vampires and this was how vampires lived, yet Carlisle wondered how well some of them would be able to handle it. He couldn’t imagine Esme coping well at all, or the other women for that matter. Emmett and Edward wouldn’t fare much better, for all that those two tried to ooze testosterone, a lot of that testosterone seemed to rely on cars, televisions, and similar human gadgets. No, it’d be Jasper and Carlisle getting them through it. And Rose, she would adjust well once she got past the loss of her cars.

Perhaps there was something to be said of domesticated animals not being fit to be released back into the wild.

A conversation he’d had with Edward shortly after their encounter with the Volturi came to mind.

Most of the family had been shopping in Seattle, the rest were hunting. It was just Carlisle and Edward still in the house, alone together for the first time since their miraculous survival the week before.

Edward had seemed anxious to talk about it.

«This isn’t over,» he’d told Carlisle, eyes blazing.

Carlisle had looked up from the book he was reading (« _ Radical Religion in Cromwell's England: A Concise History _ », one of Emmett’s funnier gag gifts. He suspected Rosalie was behind it), and frowned. «The Commonwealth?»

Edward had rolled his eyes at that. «The Volturi. Aro. You can’t think they’re going to let this slide.»

Carlisle had closed his book, and given Edward his full attention. «They thought we had an immortal child, we’ve proven that we don’t. It’s over.» He’d quickly replayed Aro’s concession in his mind for Edward, before shrugging.

Edward’s lips had tightened. «You know that’s not the point, Carlisle. They saw what Bella can do, everyone did, do you think we’ll be left alone after that?»

Carlisle had tilted his head, looked closely at his son with a crease ghosting across his brow. «What are you saying, Edward?» He’d asked softly.

Edward had crossed the room to sit next to Carlisle. «I think we should have ended it then and there. Had that battle.»

As Carlisle’s eyes had widened and he opened his mouth to protest, Edward had held up a finger. «Hear me out.»

«We had an army, more importantly we had the element of surprise. The Volturi won’t let us catch them unprepared again - let me finish,» he said as Carlisle opened his mouth again, «My point is we had our best chance.» He’d looked frustrated, likely displeased that his argument wasn’t coming out as smoothly as he’d intended. Carlisle had realized with dawning horror that Edward had planned this conversation.

Edward had smiled wryly as he heard Carlisle’s realization. «What I’m saying, Carlisle,» he had continued, «is not that I want a battle, I don’t, of course I don’t, but the Volturi are ruthless killers who want to stay in power. We just made ourselves the greatest threat to them.

We’re undesirable number one, Carlisle.»

Carlisle had sat very still as he took in Edward’s words.

Finally, slowly, he’d spoken. «Edward, I didn’t assemble an army, I assembled witnesses. I wanted to ensure we had a fair trial. I never wanted to fight the Volturi. I didn’t even think we’d stand a chance.»

«But we did,» Edward had said insistently, «with Bella-»

«Bella started practicing her gift days before they came,» Carlisle reminded him. «I thought at best she’d keep Jane from torturing a few people, I never would have dreamed she’d suddenly be able to protect all of us! Even then I didn’t think she’d work against all the Volturi, she’s not immune to Jasper! Or Alice, or Marcus!» His hands had flown up to gesture animatedly as he became more impassioned.

Edward had opened his mouth, but Carlisle hadn’t been finished.

«Edward, I need you to understand that I never wanted to be a threat to the Volturi. If I thought we were, I wouldn’t have gathered my friends in the first place!»

Edward’s mouth had fallen open. «We’d be dead!»

Carlisle had sat completely still, his eyes burning intensely as he held Edward’s gaze, determined to make Edward understand exactly why he felt the way he did. «Edward, you remember what I said after you saved Bella from Tyler Crowley’s truck.»

Edward had shaken his head in confusion. «Yes, we won’t kill humans even to protect ourselves - oh, Carlisle, no, you can’t be serious. You would rather die than hurt the Volturi? You would let us all die?» His tone was contemptuous, as if he found the notion so ludicrous that he didn’t think Carlisle was actually serious and was expecting him to say, «Of course not, what I meant was…».

But Carlisle’s lips had twisted into a facsimile of a smile. «No. But I would die to protect the secret.»

Edward’s eyes had widened, though Carlisle hadn't been sure if that was because he’d realized Carlisle was right, or if he believed his father had gone insane.

«Without the Volturi, Edward, the secret wouldn’t last a day. People would make a point of breaking the law, just to spite the memory of the Volturi.» Carlisle spoke quickly, insistently, not wanting Edward to miss out on a breath of what he was saying. «Massacres in broad daylight, immortal children, not to mention there would be no one to stop the newborn wars from spreading. The world would descend into hell, Edward. It’d be an age of demons, and it would be eternal.

Until a new coven rose like the Volturi once did to stop it, or there were no humans left at all.

There is no third option where the Volturi are overthrown, and the rest of us live peacefully ever after obeying a law no one enforces.»

Carlisle paused, letting Edward see in his mind all the vampires he’d met over the years who spoke longingly of the feast they would have if the Volturi ever fell, of Jasper’s gratitude to the Volturi for keeping the newborn wars from burning the world, of the Romanians fondly reminiscing about the bloodshed they used to engage in.

«I’m willing to die for that, Edward.» Carlisle said, and tried to convey in both thought and words just how serious he was about that. «And considering how this family is founded on our respect for life, I don’t think I’m the only one.»

Edward had been silent for a few moments, processing. Carlisle had leaned back into his chair, reliving memories of Aro telling him about the lawless world before the Volturi, of why he’d decided to create a law in the first place. He let those stories told centuries ago wash over him, knowing Edward would hear them as well.

«Humans survived just fine before the Volturi,» Edward had finally said. «Countless civilizations prospered. The Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks...»

Carlisle had chuckled. «And how many of those civilizations had superhuman gods who slaughtered at will and demanded sacrifices?»

Edward’s eyes had widened, but he recovered quickly. «In a pre-Christian, polytheistic society-»

«You’ve met Amun. A week ago. Stefan and Vladimir aren’t strangers to making the humans worship them either,» Carlisle pointed out gently.

Edward had shaken his head, still not agreeing. «So we declare ourselves gods, that’s not the same as the world descending into fiery chaos because Aro loses his throne.»

Carlisle had sighed quietly. «Edward, the world was different back then. Society has changed so much in the past few thousands of years, we might as well live on another planet. When it comes to vampires, there were a lot fewer of us, to start with. Our numbers have grown exponentially since then. Not to mention, transport was an entirely different matter, people didn’t travel the world as we do now.

And, Edward, we really know so little about the Ancient world. Don’t you think the Volturi have falsified a few historical records, removing Dareios’ complaints about demons devouring an entire outpost, censored the part where Enkidu was the finest creation in all the world and shone like a gemstone in the sun, and slotted the vampiric forces plaguing the Roman Empire in with the vandals?»

All real things that had happened, if Aro was to be believed.

«Making vampires vulnerable to crosses and salt isn’t the first time the Volturi have altered mankind’s memory.»

(Carlisle would never forget how he’d felt once he realized how much information had been lost. He’d known, of course, that there was much the world had forgotten about the ancients, but he never would have dreamed that there was a grand, demonic conspiracy to rewrite human history to keep their existence a secret.

And with that came the dawning implications of just unknown the ancient world was. How much of what humans thought they knew, was Volturi lies.

As Aro explained how he’d done it, it had been easier than Carlisle would have thought, too. It was no coincidence that Aro’s library was so full of knowledge lost to mankind. It was only lost because he’d stolen it. 

He’d either replace it with his own, falsified texts, or make it look like it had been stolen, or burned. It helped that for the longest time, humans preserved their records by creating copies, then destroying the originals. That template had served Aro well.

«I actually burned a few vampires along with that library in Alexandria. Dacians,» Aro had reminisced fondly.

Carlisle understood why Aro had done it, would have done the same in his position, but it was daunting. What would his own human life look like to future generations, if the contemporary belief in witches and vampires was censored away? He would likely be struck from the record entirely. How many events, lives, fates, had been unwritten by Aro’s pen?)

Edward still hadn’t seemed quite convinced, but he’d shaken his head, letting the argument go. «Aro had a very different explanation last week for why he upholds this law,» he’d said after a moment’s thinking.

Carlisle had frowned, for a moment wondering what Edward was talking about. «The missile talk,» he’d said after a second, nodding to himself.

Yes, Aro had held quite the speech about the threat humans comprise, hadn’t he?

«He was making that up,» Carlisle had deadpanned, shrugging again.

Edward had blinked. «He was- oh come on, Carlisle-» he’d cut himself off again, whatever he’d been about to say halted at the last minute.

Edward had tried again. «Humans aren’t a threat to us,» he’d said. «I’ve thought about it, and apart from the Pentagon, there’s just no way.»

Carlisle had laughed humorlessly. «Not even the Pentagon, Edward. If humans found out about us, they wouldn’t know how to kill us, and even if they did find out, how would they go about it? Missiles and nukes would be just about the only way, I doubt we can survive that. But that would require actually hitting us. Our senses are too attuned, we’d see and hear a warhead coming from miles away, and be gone in an instant. 

No, they might get a few of us, but for the most part they’d be killing their own. In the worst case scenario, the humans turn the earth into a nuclear wasteland.»

Edward eyebrows had risen. «Well then, Aro is either a fool or a bad liar.»

Carlisle had grinned sharply. «I think he’s a wonderful liar.» The memory of his phone call with Aro about Edward had nearly risen to the surface, but he’d squashed it before Edward could see anything damning. Still, Edward had frowned, he’d seen Carlisle hide something. 

«Don’t you think the Romanians would have been debunking Aro’s missile speech for everyone to hear if they’d figured it out? That Amun wouldn’t have? Edward, most vampires have no idea what the humans are up to at any given time, nevermind understanding their technology. Even the Denali are out of touch, remember how in the 60’s Tanya remarked it was a shame that the Eastern Europeans put their minorities in gas chambers? Jasper fought in the Civil War, and he still had no idea who won it until the fifties, nearly a century after it ended. Vampires don’t care, and they’re certainly not going to bother finding out.

That’s not to mention how difficult it can be for us to understand human society. The world moves on without us, and we can’t just fall into step like it’s a dance. I remember when I first heard the Americans were trying democracy, I thought this meant they were copying the Greek model, and I was certain they’d become a dictatorship soon enough. That’s what I get for growing up in an absolute monarchy where revolution meant we became an absolute theocracy,» Carlisle shrugged.

(He still didn’t entirely appreciate the modern form of democracy the way the rest of his family did so easily. His American citizenship was only nominal, in reality he had always been a citizen of totalitarian empires. Kings, Lord Protectors, or Volturi, they each were absolute authorities and it was a world order Carlisle took for granted the way the humans he surrounded himself with took modern democracy for granted.

This was one of the things his family didn’t understand, one of the ways in which they were aliens among vampires. They had refused to let the world move on without them, stubbornly keeping up with every step of the dance like it was a lifeline.)

Edward had been staring at him, his expression unreadable. 

Carlisle had given him a smile, hoping the conversation was resolved. «I agree that we’ve put ourselves in an - ah, awkward situation with the Volturi. I’m not sure if I agree we’re undesirable number one, but I do think we had best be mindful not to provoke them.»

His mind had wandered to Charlie knowing far too much, and he’d physically cringed.

(Carlisle would never say as much aloud, but when Charlie passed from a heart attack some time later, it had felt like a thousand tons were lifted off his shoulders.)

«And if we do provoke the Volturi? Or if they attack unprovoked?» Edward had asked.

«Then I’ll do everything in my power to save us,» Carlisle had replied. «Except stage an insurrection.»

Edward had nodded, a curt thing. «I see,» he’d stated tonelessly.

He’d let Carlisle return to his book, and lost himself in thought, sitting statue still until the others returned.

Now, as Carlisle stood waiting for Aro to arrive, he found himself thinking that it was perhaps for the best that Alice hadn’t picked up the phone. Edward would not have been able to remain civil around Aro. Besides, Carlisle doubted Bella would have been able to resist using her gift, a sign of distrust which would have made the Volturi uneasy.

And, on an utterly selfish level, Carlisle didn’t want Aro and Esme in the same room if he could avoid it.

His relationship with each of them was too different to even begin to compare the two, and he’d never gone into detail with Esme about his relationship with Aro. And Aro would know he hadn’t, and he’d be unbearable, Carlisle just knew it.

Not to mention the field day Aro would have with the details of Carlisle’s relationship with Esme.

It was a peculiar relationship he had with his wife, one more strongly influenced by agape love and an unparalleled desire to make the other as happy as possible than it was a traditional marriage. 

He still remembered his shock when Edward told him Esme was infatuated with him.

He had long since resolved himself to living single by then. An eccentric at best, a madman at worst, Carlisle had been a pariah and a prophet among vampires, a curiosity to everybody with one foot in each world. Not to mention the fact that he remained a devout Christian in a world of people who for the most part went out of their way to scorn the religious dogmas of their human lives.

He’d gotten along well enough with countless vampires before Esme, been infatuated with one, but he just couldn’t give himself to someone who didn’t cherish life.

Mates just hadn’t been for the likes of Carlisle.

But weighing heavier than all of this, was the fact that Esme looked at him with those wide, kind, adoring eyes filled to the brim with hope. Once Edward’s words opened Carlisle’s eyes to Esme’s feelings, there could be no ignoring them.

As they got to know each other, Carlisle had come to realize that here was a woman in this world he could actually marry, one he could make happy.

Falling for Esme had been easy. It was impossible not to.

Of course, Carlisle still found the notion of mates, of one true person designated for everybody, to be a bit overly romantic, not to mention fatalistic. Rosalie’s instant, instinctual love for Emmett did point towards there being something to it, as did Edward and Bella both attempting suicide within six months of separation, but Carlisle still had his doubts. Perhaps it was because he had had two such different relationships, but even if he’d never met Aro he still didn’t think he’d believe in it. No, to him, the species-wide belief in mates was a side effect of the neuroscience of vampires. They would never grow apart from their partner, never grow tired of them, never forget why they fell in love in the first place. 

Most human relationships fell apart because of change, and change wasn’t in a vampire’s DNA.

That being said, Carlisle wasn’t sure if he could imagine Esme finding happiness with anybody else.

Should she ever lose him, he hoped she’d still have the others, because Carlisle couldn’t see her ever moving on.

More, for all that he liked to think well of his fellow man, he doubted most vampires would be particularly understanding of Esme.

For Esme, waking up as a vampire was not the rebirth it was to others, not a new state of being the way everyone else saw it. No, to her, it had been a second chance at life, a chance to get things right after the harrowing trials she had been put through as a human. And so, she had given herself wholeheartedly to all the things that brought her happiness, all the things little and small that had been denied her. Speaking her mind, never being hurt, becoming an architect, having a son to dote on, a husband who held the vows he had made her.

And a marriage where she could have all the good things, and none of the things her human husband had ruined for her.

She rarely spoke of it, and Carlisle never asked, but the abuse she had gone through had rendered Esme disenchanted with intimacy. It was associated too strongly with the worst of what she had endured in life. And so, Carlisle never asked that of her, never asked anything she didn’t willingly give first. 

He was quite happy to be her safe haven.

All the same, he had a creeping feeling Aro would be unable to resist the beard jokes.

His wandering thoughts were cut off by the sound of footsteps.

Six vampires were approaching, running at full speed. Carlisle listened closely to their footsteps, wondering if he could correctly guess who Aro had brought from the sound of their footsteps alone.

He recognized Aro’s gait first, his grace unparalleled even as he ran. But then, Carlisle would have known the sound of his footsteps anywhere, so grace had little to do with it.

Jane and Alec had come too. Their steps were too light, the only two vampires Carlisle had ever come across who were slighter than Alice, and their strides short. It could be no one else.

Renata was a given since Aro never went anywhere without her. All the same, Renata was a very petite woman, which fit well with the fourth vampire he heard being about as heavy as Bella, but with shorter strides.

Felix was easily picked out, his steps even heavier than Emmett’s.

The last, then, would be Demetri.

Carlisle’s eyes widened as he took in this information. Not just one twin, but both. It seemed Aro had brought the big guns.

He stood a bit straighter and shook off the powdery snow that had fallen on him in preparation for their arrival.

They came within his field of vision about a minute later, the dense trees obscuring them until they were only a few hundred meters away.

Aro was in the middle, Renata on his arm. Jane and Alec were on each side of them, with Felix flanking Jane and Demetri flanking Alec.

Carlisle didn’t think he’d ever get used to just how tiny Jane was. Standing between Aro and Felix she looked like Thumbelina, and his stomach twisted.

In the interval of a heartbeat later, they were in front of him and stopped, though at a respectful distance.

Well, most of them kept a respectful distance. Aro lasted about a second, as he stared right into Carlisle’s eyes with undisguised delight, before he zipped up to stand close enough that Carlisle would have felt his breath if he spoke.

Renata was after him like lightning, her face mildly panicked as she glued her hand to Aro’s shoulder, eyeing Carlisle all the while.

Aro’s hands came up, each on one side of Carlisle’s face, a hair’s breadth away from touching. His eyes were wide and adoring as he seemed to bask in the bright, solid color of Carlisle’s eyes. «Exquisite,» he breathed, one of his otherworldly smiles spreading across his face as he enjoyed the sight. «I had nearly given up on you…»

His breath and scent filled Carlisle’s nostrils for the first time since they’d parted, that sweet, heady smell that reminded him of fruits and incense. He inhaled, perhaps a bit more deeply than he should have.

«It’s temporary,» was all he said.

Aro’s hmm-ed. «Maybe so, but you’ll let me enjoy this sight nonetheless. It suits you even better than the gold…»

Aro’s own eyes weren’t so bright, Carlisle noticed. He looked like it had been about a week since he last fed. Had the Volturi really made that much haste, that they hadn’t even stopped to feed?

«Thank you for coming,» Carlisle finally said, directing it at all of them. He should have opened with that. Would have, if Aro hadn’t thrown him off.

Alec, Demetri, Jane, and Renata were all glaring at him, he realized. They each looked various degrees of peeved, but each was decidedly distrustful.

Felix didn’t look particularly friendly either, but the man appeared to be distracted by Carlisle’s eyes. Like Aro, he was gazing at them, but unlike Aro, the man looked like he was staring down a particularly confounding math problem, and it just so happened to be attached to Carlisle’s face.

«Not at all…» Aro said, still a bit caught up in Carlisle’s eyes. Finally, something seemed to occur to him, as his smile faded, replaced by a displeased twist of the mouth. «Although I seem to recall asking you to get back to your family. And you never did get back to me about the Child of the Moon’s body, I’m assuming you mean to show us where it is…»

Carlisle’s lips quirked into an involuntary smile, and he had to fight the slightly hysterical urge to laugh. Aro was not going to like this at all.

«I think it’s best if I show you,» he said quietly, and put his hand outside of one of Aro’s, holding it in place as he tilted his face into his palm.

He heard Aro’s sharp intake of breath as centuries of thoughts washed over him, and his eyes finally closed as he submerged himself in Carlisle’s mind.

Several minutes went by. Carlisle and the other vampires might as well have been a statue park, they stood so still. Renata appeared to relax a bit as Aro evidently didn’t see any threats in Carlisle’s mind, although her lips were still tightly pursed as she stared down Carlisle.

Carlisle frowned lightly as he recognized Aro’s hand felt just a bit more flint-like than it had in Volterra, his skin more powdery. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, he knew Aro’s lifestyle had remained the same as it always was, but all the same this was the first time one of Carlisle’s immortal friends had physically changed from one encounter to another. It was a pleasant enough texture, smooth and still so very Aro, electrifying even after all the lifetimes that had passed, but he couldn’t keep the frown of concern off his face as he wondered whether there was some kind of unpleasant, irreversible end stage to Aro’s metamorphose.

Aro broke free of his statue-like trance at that. His eyes snapped open, hazy red that was hazier than it had been, instantly boring into Carlisle’s own eyes. «Don’t be concerned, old friend,» he said, a faint smile ghosting along the lines of his lips.

He leaned closer. «Don’t concern yourself with any of what’s happened here in Whitefish either, you’ve been exemplary.»

Carlisle released a breath he hadn’t realized was still in his lungs, and his shoulders lowered. He’d been more stressed over this than he’d allowed himself to linger on. A smile spread across his face.

Aro’s eyes crinkled in an answering smile, and he leaned back again, though still keeping his hand on Carlisle’s face. Then, looking entirely too pleased with himself for whatever was coming next, a wild grin spread across his lips, schadenfreude lighting up his face. «Although I can’t believe you ate the wolf’s heart.»

«Oh, dai, Aro,» Carlisle groaned, slipping briefly into the language they usually spoke, while the Volturi behind Aro reacted with shock.

Renata, Jane, and Felix each looked incredulous, though Alec and Demetri lit up like Aro had. Both hooted.

«Nice one, Carlisle!» Alec grinned, looking very much like a brat. 

Demetri just laughed.

« _ Why _ ?» Jane implored Carlisle, her eyes wide like saucers.

Carlisle sighed in defeat. «I didn’t know how to kill it, that thing survived me ea- tearing off a part of its neck. I wanted to make sure it was dead.» He cringed a bit at the memory. «It was a heat of the moment decision.»

Carlisle would have been very dead by now if eating werewolf hearts had been necessary and he didn’t do it, so this was a solid defense to his ears.

«Were you about to say you ate a part of its neck?» Renata asked sharply. Carlisle resisted the urge to pout, he thought he’d hidden that slip.

Aro was beaming, damn him.

At that thought, Aro winked.

«…yes.» Carlisle admitted.

Renata looked profoundly unimpressed, but the other Volturi were all snickering by now.

So much for keeping this whole fiasco under wraps. All of Volterra would know about this by the time the weekend was over, and from there this would become one of the many ridiculous urban legends floating around about Carlisle. The combination of his diet, lifestyle choices, and eccentric personality had made him something of a vampire gossip hotspot, and this led to bizarre rumors more often than not. There were vampires out there convinced that he had somehow inspired Tolkien’s elves. Carlisle didn’t want this to escalate into another game of telephone where Carlisle Cullen slums it with werewolf entrails whenever his family isn’t looking.

«As much as we all enjoy hearing about Carlisle’s esoteric dietary choices,» Aro began, finally removing his hand from Carlisle’s cheek as he moved to face his guard again, though he flipped his palm so he was still holding Carlisle’s hand, covering it with his other one. Carlisle could see just how badly the man was struggling not to descend into giggles. He glared, which only made Aro’s lips twitch more. 

«We are here to do our duty,» Aro continued. «Now, unfortunately we don’t have access to the Child of the Moon’s body, but we can still search the area. You start out as always, find the scent and work backwards from there.» He let go of Carlisle hand to pull a map and a pen out of his cloak, and made circles. «Here’s where the wolf came from, where Carlisle killed it…» he made little notes in tiny writing. Finally, he handed it to Demetri, who had come forward.

«I want the entire area searched, but be sure to be back by nightfall. We’ll meet up just outside town, there,» he tapped his finger on a circle he’d made on the map labelled «Reconnaissance» in flowing calligraphic letters.

Demetri nodded as he glanced at the map, his joking manner replaced by the professionalism so characteristic to the Volturi. He held it up for a moment for the other three to see, before folding it into his pocket. «Will do, master,» he stated.

«Jane, we might have need of you in the town yet,» Aro said airily. Carlisle frowned, it sounded like Aro had something specific in mind. «Don’t stray too far, and be sure your phone has coverage.»

Jane nodded. «Understood, master,» she said in her xylophone soprano.

As one, the four Volturi disappeared, leaving just Aro and Renata with Carlisle.

Something seemed to drain from Aro’s face then, his usual brightness replaced by a look that was so very tired, for a moment he resembled Marcus.

«I think it’s time you and I talked,» he told Carlisle, his expression closed off.

Renata’s hand came up to rest on his arm in a comforting gesture that had nothing to do with her gift, her finger straying his wrist, conveying thoughts that were private to the two of them. There was a gentle look on her face as she looked up at him.

He smiled fondly down at her, cheered by whatever she had conveyed or perhaps composing himself, and squeezed her arm.

«How about your hotel room?» Aro suggested lightly to Carlisle.

Carlisle nodded. «Sounds good,» he said.

They were just about to move when Aro’s cloak buzzed. He frowned, and pulled out his phone, smiling wryly when he saw the name on the display. «Caius making sure we weren’t all killed in an ambush,» he explained dryly, before picking up. «We live,» he told the phone.

Carlisle was amused to hear Caius on the other end of the line pushing out over a dozen questions in a matter of questions, most of them centered on his misgivings about one Carlisle Cullen’s character.

«It’s fine- it’s fine- Caius-» Aro tried, and shot an embarrassed look up at Carlisle, like a teen having to placate his mother in front of the cool kids. «Caius, he’s standing right next to me.»

«Greetings,» Carlisle said, unable to keep the humor from his voice.

That shut Caius up.

«Call me when you’re alone,» he said curtly, before hanging up.

Aro pocketed the phone again. «Sorry about that,» he said.

Carlisle only smiled with his eyebrows raised. Having just been outed as a werewolf entrail eater to the Volturi, he didn’t really feel bad for Aro.

«To the hotel, then,» he said softly. Aro and Renata both nodded, and the three of them took off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can take Carlisle out of the seventeenth century, but you can’t take the seventeenth century out of Carlisle. He’s bound to see society quite differently from the way his family sees it, and if no one else explores that then I’ll do it myself.
> 
> And I know I just swore in fandom church by questioning the sexy sexiness of Carlisle and Esme’s marriage, but Meyer specifically called their relationship spiritual and I’m running with it. There is just no sexy way to spin that. She called them that as a contrast to Rosalie and Emmett’s physical relationship, no less.
> 
> Praise be to The Carnivorous Muffin, God Emperor among betas.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the word count, I truly do. Best of luck, brave readers.

There was something surreal about having Aro and Renata in his hotel room.

These old, timeless beings, enforcers of a clandestine law that kept the fabric of the world from unravelling, standing in a two star American hotel room felt like the beginning of a bad joke.

Renata looked around the room with a trace of curiosity. Carlisle wondered if she had ever been in a hotel room before. She might have seen some on television, but that was assuming she watched television. Quite a few vampires didn’t care for it: the resolution was designed for human eyes, it took some getting used to.

Aro had already seen the room in Carlisle’s memory, and unbuttoned his cloak, folding it neatly and placing it on the room’s only table. He was wearing a black suit underneath, easily the most austere outfit Carlisle had ever seen him wear.

It suited him, but…

Seeing Aro in a total absence of frills and elaborate embroideries was like seeing Alice in a tracksuit. Carlisle didn’t want to focus on it, knowing Aro would see his thoughts again soon enough, but all the same…

Aro. In a suit.

It boggled the mind.

Renata followed suit, removing her Volturi cloak and folding it on top of Aro’s. She’d gone all out with the winter aesthetic, ice blues and fuzzy whites dominating her dress and matching boots. She looked lovely, if a bit chic considering they were on a werewolf-killing mission. And Carlisle could only wonder how she planned to feed in colors that bright. The blood would ruin it in seconds. He suspected the excitement of getting to dress for a non-Tuscan landscape had trumped pragmatism.

Aro glided to the room’s only chair, turning it slightly so it faced the bed as he sat down. Renata moved to stand behind him, one hand sliding down the chair, barely grazing Aro’s shoulder. No one would go near him on her watch.

Least of all Carlisle, if the distrust shining in her eyes was any indication.

She had insisted on coming when they arrived at the hotel. Aro had clearly planned for her to remain outside, giving the two men some privacy, but Renata wouldn’t have it.

She’d placed her hand in Aro’s, looked intently up at him.

Aro had looked back for a few seconds, a silent conversation passing between them. Finally, Aro looked up at Carlisle, who had been watching curiously. «Do you mind if she joins us?» he’d asked.

«No,» Carlisle had simply said, and that had been that.

Although…

Carlisle understood why Renata was cautious, any bodyguard worth her salt would be after their last encounter. More, Carlisle had been drinking human blood. Aro was a fierce fighter, but he had never been a particularly strong vampire, so Carlisle could, theoretically, overpower him. Renata had reason to be cautious.

Even so, that it should come to this between him and Aro was not something Carlisle ever would have thought, not in his wildest dreams.

«Please,» Aro said to Carlisle, motioning with a hand towards the bed. He said it so politely that Carlisle could only do as he was told, eyebrows raised at the ease with which Aro had made himself at home.

Now here they were.

Aro was nervous, Carlisle realized. His hands were folded just a bit too neatly in his lap, an old tell for how he would keep from launching himself at a person to read their thoughts, and his brow was slightly furrowed.

Finally, after a few seconds that felt like much longer, Aro said, «I think I should start by apologizing for the mess surrounding the newborn army that attacked your family.»

Carlisle’s eyes widened momentarily. He didn’t know what he’d expected Aro to say, but that hadn’t been it. «Victoria’s army,» he supplied, for lack of anything else to say.

Aro’s frown grew deeper «You must understand, Carlisle, we didn’t realize for a long time that it was a newborn army pestering Seattle. It was unheard of. When we did realize…» he trailed off, his lips pursed tightly.

He looked sharply up at Carlisle.

«What I tell you now never leaves this room. You do not tell your family about this.»

Carlisle tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. «I’m not going to promise that,» he said. He would not start hiding things from his family, and certainly not for Aro’s sake. Nothing good would come from that.

Something flashed in Aro’s eyes, irritation maybe, but it was gone before Carlisle could properly identify it. «I don’t trust your family, Carlisle,» he said coldly, and it sounded like he had a lot more to say on the subject that he just barely managed to keep to himself. «And this is a delicate matter.»

Carlisle glared right back. «Well, if you can’t trust my family, I think it’s best you keep this to yourself,» he replied, just as cold as Aro.

Aro glared back for a moment, openly frustrated now. Then, he seemed to say to hell with it. «Caius went behind my back,» he stated, his voice hard and sharp like a knife against metal.

Carlisle drew his head back, completely thrown. «Wait, what?»

Aro exhaled slowly, his lips twisted unpleasantly as if he’d swallowed human food. «I dispatched Jane to take care of the newborn army. Caius then privately ordered her to, ah, consider the… necessity of immediate intervention.»

Carlisle stared.

He’d known foul play had been afoot. Jane’s late arrival had been aggressively well timed. No, Carlisle had long suspected Caius was behind it.

The question had been whether Aro knew about it and approved or, worse, if it wasn’t Caius’ orders at all, but Aro’s. And given Aro’s gift, how likely was it that he’d been conveniently ignorant? 

And even if it were only Caius, why hadn’t Aro called Carlisle immediately upon finding out what Jane did, if only to reassure Carlisle that his family had nothing to fear from the Volturi? If his reasoning had been that he didn’t want anybody to know about Caius’ treachery, then it seemed he put his reputation above his friendship with Carlisle.

At this point, the distinction of who exactly had given the order didn’t even make much of a difference. Aro had handled it poorly, and the Volturi were structured in a way that had allowed it to happen in the first place.

To hear Aro outright admit that the Volturi had allowed themselves to become corrupt, in a way that conveniently made him an innocent party…

Carlisle really hadn’t thought he could be more disenchanted by his old friend than he already was, yet here they were. 

«When it comes to the girl, Bree… I am sorry that Jane made the call she did, that was… it was within the law, but not how I would have interpreted the law in her place. It was unnecessarily strict.»

«Could we get back to the part where Caius ordered Jane to let my family die for no reason?» Carlisle said, almost airily.

Aro’s answer came several seconds late. A normal response time for humans, but not for a vampire. He was choosing his words carefully. «What Caius did… it was unforgivable. I can make no excuses for that, all I can do is ask your forgiveness.

You must understand, Carlisle, Caius is… over the years he has gotten used to being the sane man, the one who makes the… the one who does what others will not. Marcus isn’t up for it, and in this case, when it came to you… he was not pleased, Carlisle, by my letting your son go after he broke the law. He did not think I could be impartial, and he did not like a large, powerful coven being granted such lenience. I am _not_ excusing his behavior,» Aro stressed when Carlisle leaned forward to speak, «I am trying to explain it.»

But he was most certainly excusing it.

If Carlisle still had blood, it would be boiling.

Anger was to Carlisle like a reclusive neighbor, perhaps sometimes they crossed paths but they didn’t know each other very well and they certainly never spent any time together.

Well, anger had now stormed across the lawn, torn open the door to Carlisle’s house, and was pouring gasoline on everything, screaming, matchsticks in hand.

Every word out of Aro’s mouth was worse than the last, and the man somehow thought that he was making a solid case for himself.

In the near four hundred years Carlisle had lived, this was easily the most furious he had ever been with anybody.

Even assuming that he was telling the truth, that it really had only been Caius behind it all, that didn’t make this entire affair any less horrifying. No, if anything, Aro’s belief that this was anything other than unforgivable, that Caius’ deplorable actions were reasonable if one only considered them from his point of view, made it worse. If Aro sincerely believed that anybody, nevermind Carlisle, would be at all appeased by this explanation, then it seemed Carlisle had severely misjudged his once friend.

Carlisle’s coven had been made to suffer because Caius had a disagreement with Aro, Seattle had been painted red with the blood of countless humans, and Aro thought that Carlisle would merely say, «Oh, so it was a misunderstanding! Oh well, it happens,» if he made his case well enough.

People had died, Carlisle’s family had to go through untold stress and nearly die, and they were forced to drag a group of teenagers into a battle to death. All of it could have been prevented if the Volturi had been able to do their damn job.

Even after the Volturi had come to execute them and gone, Carlisle hadn’t wanted to believe some of the things people were saying about Aro, but this need to have Carlisle drop all his grievances and forgive him was starting to look like narcissism.

«What difference does it make if I don’t forgive this?» Carlisle asked icily, and felt his face twist into an unpleasant expression.

Renata’s hand came down to clutch Aro’s shoulder.

«Does Caius suffer any consequences? Does Jane? Does anything change, so this won’t happen again?»

And the capital question, _how many times has this happened before?_

Aro opened his mouth to answer, but Carlisle pressed on.

«Or do you just want me to forgive you, and let it be out of this world? My family could have been killed, Aro!» And even with the wolves helping out, there had been several close calls. Jasper, Rosalie, Alice, Esme, and Emmett: Carlisle had come far too close to losing each of them. «Countless humans did die, will you be asking their families for forgiveness?»

No, Carlisle wasn’t going to let this slide.

His fondness for Aro remained, there was no doing anything about that. This was the downside to being as he was. 

To humans, new memories erased the old, and the present outweighed the past. A memory, once ruined, became warped into something new and better suited for the new reality. They were kaleidoscopical, always seeing themselves in a new way with every turn of the wheel called time.

It was not so for vampires.

No matter the time that passed, no matter what Aro proved himself to be in the harsh present, Carlisle’s memories of the time they’d shared together in Volterra remained as vivid as ever. If he closed his eyes, he could bring to mind any little moment he chose with the same ease he remembered Esme’s face.

And as such, severing his emotional tie to Aro was not something he could ever do. 

His brain chemistry, whatever it looked like (to this day he had yet to figure out how to examine a vampire’s brain), simply didn’t permit it.

No, he would never be fully over Aro, over any of this, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t live with it.

«Jane is… complicated. She is not immature, but she has… she was given an order, she agreed with it, and when she was upset it didn’t work she took it out on the poor newborn girl. She was issued appropriate punishment.»

«Jane wasn’t really the point here.»

«What am I supposed to do about Caius, then? House arrest in the tower?» Aro asked.

«We had one of the worst fights we’ve ever had when I found out. It was… there is a reason, Carlisle, why I didn’t immediately call you to clear this up. I wanted to close this chapter. It was terrible, but no one was hurt, no one died, no one-»

«Bree died. God only knows how many humans.»

«And I am sorry about that, Carlisle, I really, truly am,» Aro implored, «but while I do think Jane was too strict with her, we do have a better safe than sorry policy. A vampire who has broken the law, however unintentionally, is likely to break it again. You understand the law better than most of our kind, Carlisle, you of all people should understand why Jane has been encouraged to err on the side of caution.»

There were things Carlisle would like to say to that, a lot of things, but this was one of those conversations where he could see that he and Aro would only be going in circles.

More, it seemed Aro had more he wanted to talk about.

To what end, Carlisle wondered.

Aro was asking forgiveness over a decade after the fact, boldly admitting that the Volturi were perfectly corrupt when it suited them, taking no responsibility for the people who died, and when Carlisle asked for repercussions, accountability, anything, he offered up a measly «I yelled at Caius.»

Carlisle was starting to wonder why Aro even wanted this conversation. He should have brought Chelsea, saved them both this nonsense. Easy friendship uncomplicated by Carlisle’s very legitimate grievances seemed to be what Aro wanted, after all.

Wordlessly, Carlisle offered Aro his hand.

Aro took it in both of his own, stroking the back of Carlisle’s hand idly with his thumb as he pursed his lips.

Carlisle watched as Aro saw just how poorly the conversation was working out so far. It was subtle, but Carlisle knew him too well, and saw how he deflated, and the hazy film in his eyes seemed to grow more opaque.

It was a painful contrast to before, when Carlisle would brush a hand against Aro’s, and that brief, literal meeting of the minds would brighten Aro’s mood like turning on a light.

Carlisle withdrew his hand.

«Carlisle,» Aro said in a voice so quiet, like a bird’s wings flapping in the wind, like he didn’t want to say anything at all, «you must understand that I tried to act as I deemed best.»

«Then we can agree that there’s room for improvement.» Carlisle retorted coldly.

Aro winced.

Carlisle could only shake his head.

Even assuming Aro had done as he claimed, and this was all just a tragic series of misunderstandings and bad calls, they were simply past that point. 

More, Carlisle had no illusions that Aro would have minded much less if this had happened to someone other than Carlisle. He certainly couldn’t imagine Aro apologizing to Tanya for Irina’s execution.

And it was more likely than not that Caius had made similar calls before, and Aro showed no interest in pursuing a course of action to meaningfully prevent this from happening to people who weren’t Carlisle. 

No, Carlisle strongly doubted Aro would care much beyond shaking his head regretfully.

Carlisle exhaled slowly, until his lungs were empty of air, as he searched for words. 

He didn’t find any.

Aro was silent as well as he watched Carlisle in anticipation.

Finally, when it became clear that Carlisle wasn’t going to speak, Aro drew breath.

«I should correct the assumption that Alice’s recruitment is a top priority of mine,» he then said, abruptly changing the subject. Like the conversation had taken such a nosedive that he was leaving its mangled body on the battlefield, saving what he could instead.

Carlisle resisted the urge to sigh.

«Please,» he said, motioning with one hand for Aro to continue. Sometimes, the only way out of hell is through.

Aro broke eye contact, and looked briefly at the wall behind Carlisle.

«She is gifted,» he began, «undeniably so. I’ve never seen anyone like her. The closest was a priestess from Delphi, but her gift was cryptic. She would- I digress,» he cut himself off, looking momentarily annoyed with himself.

Three thousand years old, and his attention span still was as terrible as Carlisle remembered.

He’d had so much fun with it in Volterra, too, once he figured out just how easily Aro became completely distracted. He’d always come up with new ways to break the older vampire’s concentration, and it never failed. Well, unless it was Carlisle that Aro was focused on.

Aro, meanwhile, was trying again. He caught Carlisle’s eyes once more. «Alice is very talented and undeniably powerful, but her gift has drawbacks. It is fickle, and she can only clearly see those who are close to her. She couldn’t even see what James was planning, and she knew exactly what he wanted.

I tried, and I tried, to think of ways in which she could be useful to us… for curiosity’s sake, of course,» he added that last part hurriedly, with a hand gesture like a butterfly batting its wings as he physically whisked the last sentence out of the metaphorical window.

Carlisle was not impressed.

«The use I would have for her, the intel I would want from a psychic, is where a crime will occur next, and who will commit it,» Aro continued. «But her gift doesn’t work like that.» He pouted as he said that last part, not hiding that this was a terrible shame. To him, it must have been. «So many vampires break the law in split second decisions, she wouldn’t see it until it was too late. Even then, who would she watch? She can’t watch every single vampire in the world, as it is she can only see those closest to her clearly, everyone else gives her vague flashes. She could look out for our guard getting attacked, but with the twins we don’t need to worry about that,» Aro rambled on, his hands raising from his lap to gesture in quick, frustrated snaps. 

Carlisle tilted his head as he thought about Aro’s words.

He’d taken for granted that Alice would make for an invaluable addition to the Volturi. She was certainly invaluable to his family, without her they would all have been dead several times over.

But their problems hadn’t been the kinds of problems the Volturi would be having. The Volturi didn’t have to worry about surprise armies showing up, for one thing.

More, though, Aro had a far more intimate understanding of Alice’s gift than Carlisle could ever have. The only person who knew Alice better than Aro, was Alice herself. And yet, what Aro was saying fit with what Carlisle had seen himself.

Alice was never wrong about things like the weather, or whether Bella would like the next dress she bought her, but when it came to less prosaic futures it seemed she was always choosing between a variety of futures, sometimes helping the one she liked best along the way so it would be fulfilled. It kept their family safe and reasonably in control of their surroundings, but she had her limits.

It was Alice’s gift, and as such, it worked the way best suited for Alice. And Alice had no need to know that at any given moment, a vampire she’d never met was doing something Aro didn’t want him to.

Carlisle could believe that Aro had no need of her in his guard.

As for Edward…

When Carlisle first told Edward of the Volturi, of his time there and their dazzling leader who collected and cultivated vampire gifts like art pieces, Edward had gotten a somber look on his face.

«We’d best not let him know about me, then,» he’d said, his eyes still shining with newborn red.

Carlisle had tried to reassure him that Aro only took those willing, and likely wouldn’t have a need for Edward anyway, considering his own very similar and far more daunting gift, but Edward had not been convinced.

And, Carlisle suspected, he had been a little offended as well. Carlisle should perhaps not have dismissed the possibility of Aro’s interest quite so nonchalantly, but he hadn’t been able to imagine a particular use for Edward’s skill to the Volturi. He truly had meant to reassure his young protégé.

Carlisle had had his doubts, then, when Edward claimed that Aro wanted him and Alice.

Even as his trust in Aro had fallen to pieces, Carlisle had never thought Edward was on the top of Aro’s agenda, or even a priority at all. Edward would only agitate the guard, as giving their thoughts to their leader under controlled circumstances is a rather different matter from being constantly spied on by the new guy.

But if Aro wasn’t interested in Alice either…

Carlisle wondered when he’d arrived at that conclusion. Surely not right at once, perhaps not even in time for his second encounter with her. He’d been a little too excited to see her. And yet, from the way he vented, Carlisle had the feeling he’d bemoaned this exact thing before, and many times at that. To Marcus, most likely.

Aro had only ever hinted at why Marcus was the way he was. Quite frankly Carlisle had no idea what was wrong with that one. 

Aro was attached to him, that much was clear. 

He’d go out of his way to project thoughts and feelings onto the man («Isn’t this delightful, Marcus?», Aro would say enthusiastically, clapping his hands, once going as far as to put his thumbs on the corners on Marcus’ lips and pull them upwards, not at all bothered by Marcus’ dead eyes staring hollowly back) and keep him up to date on all the little things Aro thought Marcus should be kept up to date with, from human civilization to funny things Carlisle had said.

Whatever had happened to make Marcus the way he was, Carlisle knew that Aro had been there for it, and probably tried to get him to snap out of it in the early days. Although, Carlisle couldn’t for the life of him imagine there ever being a Marcus before Marcus…

Vampires were unchanging, and this species-wide phenomenon tended to present itself in the strangest ways. Just as Marcus would always be Marcus, it seemed Aro would never be able to give up on him, even as he knew it was futile.

«Alice would be a - and I respect her very much when I say this - but Alice would be a collector’s item for me,» Aro concluded. «Like young Benjamin. Delightful gift, I would love to have him, but I have no use for it.»

Carlisle’s eyebrows rose. It had always been an unspoken truth that Aro collected vampires like trinkets, Aro always found flowery ways of saying it. Carlisle suspected Aro had chosen brutal honesty in the hopes of appearing more trustworthy.

Aro leaned forward, and placed a hand on Carlisle’s clothed wrist as he looked intently into his eyes. «Carlisle, you must believe that while I would be delighted to have Alice in my guard, she is not worth any of what happened. Certainly not worth you,» he concluded, the hand on Carlisle’s wrist tightening its grip.

Carlisle gazed back at Aro as he contemplated his words.

«What do you want, Aro?» He finally asked quietly.

Aro furrowed his brow and opened his mouth to talk, but Carlisle cut him off. «So my children don’t have to worry about you absconding with them in the dead of the night, we appreciate that. As for the rest… Aro, even if you are telling the truth,» he held up a hand as Aro opened his mouth to argue, «that doesn’t change the fact that Caius acted little better than a human mafia boss, taking out a hit because it suited him. It doesn’t change that Jane took out a petty grudge on a defenseless girl, it doesn’t change that people died over this nonsense, and what certainly doesn’t change any of this is you showing up thirteen years after the fact to ask me if we can let bygones be bygones!»

He was nearly shouting by the end of his tirade.

Aro leaned forwards, face stony. «Look-» he began, but Carlisle wasn’t having it. 

He got on his feet and started pacing as he vented.

«You want me to trust you, well, how can I? You could have called me as soon as you found out what happened with Victoria’s army, you didn’t. When we do talk on the phone it’s so that you can tell baseless lies about my son! And you can say all you like about the mess with Renesmée, I’m sure that’s next on the agenda. You did have reason to come, but you can’t very well say it was a harmless misunderstanding when you had Alec use his gift on us!»

That had been a moment Carlisle would never forget.

Stronger than his relief that Bella’s gift had actually worked, that they might stand a chance of surviving after all, had been his horror that Alec had used his gift in the first place. He’d been given the order, and if it weren’t Bella, that would have been it. Carlisle, his family, and all his friends would all have died that day, and become yet another cautionary tale for foolhardy vampires who thought they could hold the Volturi accountable.

And when Alec didn’t work, Aro’s other _collector’s items_ had each tried their turn.

Aro could say what he wanted, but his actions screamed louder than his words ever could.

«Again, Aro, I just have to ask what it is that you want here, because if it’s my friendship then frankly, this is too little, too late.»

At that, Aro’s eyes snapped up from where they’d sunk to the floor to meet Carlisle’s. They were blazing. «I see,» he said, surprisingly emotionless. «I confess I am disappointed.»

«Disappointed?!» Carlisle couldn’t believe his own ears.

«Yes!» Aro snapped back, getting out of his chair. Renata actually didn’t follow him, in fact she threw a quick look at the door, as if she wanted to bolt. «I happen to quite value our friendship, I always have, but it’s clear to me now that you don’t!»

Someone in the room hissed, and Carlisle realized after a second that it had been him. «How dare you,» he whispered. «How dare you put this on me. You’ve been absolutely precious to me for all these centuries, I’ve valued our friendship more than any other. How dare you make me the one at fault here!»

«Carlisle, I do apologize for doubting you,» Aro said, and once again he was unspeakably nervous. As if this was the fateful moment, when in truth this was only the culmination. The fateful moments had come and gone, one by one like a funeral procession, and he hadn’t done anything to fix it then.

Carlisle sighed, and broke eye contact.

No matter how things had gotten between them, seeing someone who had once been the dearest thing in the world to him look so defeated brought Carlisle no joy at all.

«You realize, don’t you, that you did this?» Carlisle asked quietly, before bringing his eyes up to meet Aro’s again. «I can’t even say that I appreciate the effort you’re making here, because you are _so_ inconsiderate.»

Damnit, his throat was closing up.

Aro sat down on the bed.

«About Alec…» he began in the quietest voice Carlisle had ever come out of him, like a ghost’s breath on the wind. Carlisle laughed humorlessly. It seemed Aro had no idea when to just stop. «Carlisle, you had a large gathering of vampires, they were a threat. Alec’s gift isn’t lethal…» he trailed off before he reached some conclusion.

Carlisle waited.

«For this large a gathering to show up united against us… Carlisle, a show of force was needed. In the past, this was the way we would get vampires we weren’t going to execute to fear us unequivocally. It is necessary, Carlisle, you know the world we live in.»

«Vampire you weren’t going to execute,» Carlisle echoed faux-thoughtfully. «As in, vampires who hadn’t committed any crimes?»

Aro pressed his lips together. «Unique situations arise from time to time.»

Carlisle let his facial expression speak for him.

«Carlisle, I try to be just, I truly do, there would be no point to this self-imposed law if I didn’t,» he continued, though he was still avoiding Carlisle’s eyes. «I am sorry about everything that’s happened between us, I truly am, more deeply than words can express.»

He got up to his feet, and floated towards Carlisle. He reached out to touch Carlisle’s shoulder, his other hand suspended in the air a few inches from Carlisle’s face.

He had always done this, even the first time they’d met. Like his hands formed a frame, and Carlisle’s face a portrait he sought to adulate by singling it out in that manner.

«The survival of the Volturi was my first priority, but Carlisle, you must realize, preserving your life was of utmost importance to me as well. And the lives of those precious to you.»

He looked so sincere too, his eyes wide and open as they stared directly into Carlisle’s. There wasn’t a trace of his usual fluctuating humors, only somber sincerity.

«Would you have done it?» Carlisle asked.

Aro’s lips twitched, but he didn’t look away. «I wanted to avoid it, I truly…» he trailed off, or his voice left him. His eyes flickered off towards the side.

«I’ll take that as a yes, then,» Carlisle said coldly, his voice like the biting, penetrating cold of winds in the winter.

«You gathered an army, Carlisle!» Aro hissed.

«Witnesses! Because you’d made it quite clear with Jane that the law doesn’t apply if the Volturi have a problem with the coven.» Faster than any viper, Carlisle reached his hand out to hold Aro’s cheek and replayed his belief that Eleazar was wasting Bella’s time that she could spend with her loved ones, that he was giving everybody false hope, his shock when she was able to stave off the Volturi, his conversation with Edward. Aro had to have seen it already, but it seemed he needed a reminder.

Surprisingly, Renata hadn’t reacted to Carlisle making uninvited physical contact. She was gazing at the hotel television remote, almost demonstrably, her face artfully disinterested in everything happening around her.

Aro closed his eyes briefly as he took in Carlisle’s rapid fire memories. «Regardless of your intentions, Carlisle, you must see the situation we ended up in…»

And what else was Carlisle supposed to do? Sit back and wait for the Volturi to kill his family, hoping they had developed a sense of integrity in the six months since they last met?

No, Aro had only himself to blame.

He wondered if Aro would have killed him himself, or looked away. If he would have been the first to go, spared the sight of his loved ones burning, or if Aro would have spared his old lover for last, prolonging those last few seconds of Carlisle’s life as much as he could.

Aro jerked his face from Carlisle’s hand as if burned, and looked away.

Carlisle drew in a sharp breath as he realized that Aro had given that very matter some thought.

For several seconds, perfect silence reigned. They all stood still in the way only vampires could, marble statues woefully misplaced in this cheap hotel room.

Carlisle felt a piece of his heart detach itself from the rest, and sink into some void from which it could never be retrieved, as he realized with an unbearable finality that this was it.

Even after everything that had happened between him and Aro, things between them had remained unresolved.

Now, however…

When this was done, when whatever remaining Children of the Moon might still be out there had been put to rest, the Volturi would leave and there would be no reason for Carlisle and Aro to speak again.

There was nothing left to be said.

Their relationship, once so strong and vibrant, second in Carlisle’s heart only to his faith, had been a natural thing in the world order. He never could have imagined anything getting between them. Nothing big, at the very least, and never anything that would cause him to walk away.

But there were only ruins left now, eroded and broken down by the treachery and distrust that had sunk its roots between them, for all that it seemed Aro hadn’t realized as much until now.

He looked at Aro, truly looked at him.

His dearest, oldest friend, and in the past few years the object of countless hours spent pouring over the things Aro had let happen…

His features were as refined and delicate as they had always been, framed by thick, shining hair, the color so black it was like looking into the absence of light. Like most vampires, he bore the clear signs of having held beauty in life as well, but the venom had refined his features to the point where the resemblance to humans was fleeting at best.

This was one of the things common to all vampires. No matter their specific appearance, they all shared that unidentifiable something where their faces were refined into something too symmetric and smooth to ever pass as humans. Even if they hadn’t had that opaque stone skin, luminous even without the sunlight, and the unnatural eye color, even if they weren’t too graceful and still, they would still stand out.

Their faces were too sharp, carved from their human faces with perfect precision, rendering them what trees were to the shadows in Plato’s cave. They were the perfect, flawless, inimitable, and impossible ideal, not unfairly likened to angels. Humans were the mundane answer to that, each with their own, individual little flaws, imperfect in their own, unique, little way, and all the more precious for it.

On any other creature, the shadows under their eyes, more like a swirl of color through marble rather than blood vessels, would be flaws marring their faces, but on vampires it served as a warning. _This isn’t human,_ that color seemed to say. _Don’t step too close_.

His new appearance had been a particularly hard blow after Carlisle had woken up. Nowadays he only had a vague recollection of what his face had looked like in life, but the moment he spotted his reflection in a lake and saw that it wasn’t his own at all, was one he could never forget, even if he hadn’t had his crystalline memory. It had been yet another thing vampirism had taken from him, just as his voice, just as he’d thought he couldn’t possibly lose any more.

In time he had accepted this, but it had not been easy going at first.

Overall, Carlisle had found that vampires were best described by the human term he still couldn’t quite believe had been coined for robots, of all things, though he supposed it was appropriate. Uncanny valley.

Looked, walked, and talked like a human, but a vampire wasn’t close to anything human and humans knew as much instinctively, animals too, though much to Carlisle’s good fortune the humans resolutely ignored that instinct.

Aro, though, Aro fooled no one. Centuries upon the throne had petrified him, turning his skin to flint and drawing a haze before his eyes like a shimmery curtain, it was as though the venom that had once burned his humanity from him had taken a step further. The veneer of pretense had been drawn away from his face, like a human removes makeup with a tissue. Humans didn’t need primal instincts to recognize that he wasn’t one of them, his otherness was clear as day.

That, combined with his delicately sculpted features and thin build, lent him an air of ethereal frailty. Like he only had one foot in the material world, the other in that ideal, unearthly dimension vampires belonged in.

A face unlike anything that could be imagined for those who hadn’t laid eyes upon him, further proof for Carlisle that God had a hand in the sculpting of all beings, even demons. Only God could create a face like Aro’s.

It was a face he would miss.

He was glad vampires couldn’t weep, or his face would be very wet by now.

Aro’s as well, if the devastated look in his eyes was any indication.

Eternity could pass like this, Carlisle thought idly, in this painful moment before they parted ways, neither one willing to take that first, final step away.

He supposed it had to be him. Looking at Aro now, it seemed he never would. They would petrify before he moved.

He drew in a shaky, hitched joke of a breath, and spoke before he could change his mind. «You should know, I… I thought our friendship would be eternal. That was how I wanted it to be,» he whispered that last part, his voice so quiet he doubted Renata caught it.

He threw a quick look at her, and was dimly surprised to see that she’d turned her back on them and appeared to be flipping through the book he’d brought for the weekend. It was a textbook on rare fungal brain infections. He had to admire her efforts to give them privacy.

Aro had caught it, though, and he stepped closer, as close as he’d been in the clearing. «Then don’t let this ruin us,» he said intently, his eyes flickering with the dying flame of a house burned down.

«Carlisle, all the things that happened… nothing like that will happen again, I promise you.»

Carlisle couldn’t even muster the energy to huff at that, to express his disagreement. He was hollowed out. «So, Caius won’t have a problem with the federal homicide investigation I’m currently a prime suspect in?» Aro had made it quite clear he couldn’t control his co-rulers, nor his subjects.

That had Renata’s attention. She spun around, her eyes wide. «Federal investigation?!» she echoed shrilly.

Her voice rang with that unparalleled chime only immortals could produce, and Carlisle flinched, worried the humans would hear it. He had made enough shitty excuses for the weekend as it was, he didn’t need to add playing the triangle alone in his room to the list.

«Not Carlisle’s fault,» Aro supplied quickly, not taking his eyes off of Carlisle.

«And yet, things that aren’t my fault have a funny tendency of becoming my problem anyway.» Carlisle’s voice was growing cold again. They were just dragging this out at this point.

Aro hmm-ed impatiently. «Caius doesn’t need to know.»

Renata’s jaw actually fell at that, and Carlisle could sympathize. 

He stared at Aro. 

«What?» He hissed.

«Caius would never believe me that you’re blameless. And since no crime has been committed, there’s no need for any reports,» Aro listed, his tone remarkably shameless for someone who had just graduated from telling Carlisle about his petty conspiracies to dragging Carlisle into his petty conspiracies.

To think Carlisle had thought they’d hit rock bottom a mere few moments ago.

But…

Goddamnit, Aro.

Carlisle had absolutely no desire to get involved in any of this petty and, frankly, corrupt nonsense, but it had been made inescapably clear that he’d be the one paying the price if Caius found out about this. And Edward had been right about one thing. Now that Bella had revealed her power, Caius would love an excuse to take out Carlisle and his family.

Carlisle would have to go along with this.

And he doubted Aro’s silence was free.

More, he wondered just how blind Aro could be, if he honestly thought that an appropriate solution to having a co-ruler who took out hits on innocent covens was to lie and cover things up. Was this even the first time he’d hid something from Caius, or was history littered with things Aro had deemed too sensitive for others to know?

No wonder the Volturi had lost their way.

«Carlisle?» Aro asked carefully, studying Carlisle’s face with a frown.

He looked genuinely mystified. Had he expected Carlisle to be happy he was doing this? Grateful, perhaps?

Carlisle only shook his head, and touched his face again, his thumb brushing Aro’s cheekbone as his other fingers ghosted along his jaw.

Aro only let him remain in contact for a second, before drawing his head back. He didn’t like what he was seeing, then. «I expect nothing in return, and if you have any better suggestions, please! I welcome them.»

Carlisle’s hand dropped to his side as he gazed silently at Aro. «Do you see my point, at least?»

Aro only pursed his lips and, after what looked like a moment’s indecision, thundered ahead. «I’ve done it before,» he said.

Carlisle’s eyes widened. He hadn’t expected an admission.

Before he could ask, though, Aro continued. He didn’t look like he cared all that much about the consequences anymore, though Carlisle supposed he had no reason to, having just seen how all roads would lead to the Rome of their ruin anyway. «I’ve hidden something from Caius once, and it was for you.» He took a step forward, a bit too close now.

«Me?» Carlisle frowned. That couldn’t be right. He took a step back.

«Have you forgotten, _old friend_ , the details of our last encounter? I saw Edward’s heart. And in it I saw quite a few things, among them just how much dear Charlie Swan had learned…»

Carlisle’s eyes widened with realization. 

He heard Renata’s sharp intake of breath, and looked at her. She was staring at him in shock, which as he watched turned into barely restrained outrage.

She had every right, Carlisle could only imagine how poorly she must regard him and his family by now. It sounded like they did nothing but break the law.

«I could have brought that up, told everyone in the clearing about dear Miss Isabella Swan getting to have it all, even her human father. It would have ruined your credibility, Carlisle, you couldn’t have claimed to be innocent after that. It might not have made a difference to some of your witnesses, we both know many were there hoping to overthrow me, but it would have made a difference. And it would certainly have galvanized the witnesses on my side.

And there would have been a battle.»

«Why didn’t you?» Carlisle asked.

«It was the shapeshifter’s indiscretion that led to the sheriff knowing, for one thing, and not yours,» Aro replied. «Punishing you for the shapeshifter’s egotistical folly… I decided against it.»

If this had truly been something Aro was weighing back and forth in the clearing that day, how come Edward never mentioned it? Carlisle raised his eyebrows. «And yet you were more than a bit reluctant to concede Renesmée’s existence wasn’t a crime.»

«A child like her had never been seen before, I had to be sure-»

«Not the same thing, Aro! Even if she hadn’t been harmless, even then her existence by itself wouldn’t have been a crime! Laws can’t work retroactively, our execution wouldn’t have been justified!»

«So I was just to leave, hope she didn’t grow up to be god knows what?»

«As opposed to punishing a coven that broke no law?»

«I didn’t want to punish you in the first place!»

Carlisle threw his hands in the air. «We’re going in circles.»

«My point is, Carlisle, I went out of my way not to hurt you, as far as I could justify it.» He exhaled slowly, shaking his head slowly as the tension went out of him.

«I do respect the law, Carlisle. Perhaps I go out of my way to be understanding when you’re concerned, but on each of the past counts where your family stretched the line, the circumstances were… unusual.

Bella knew the secret and you went out of your way to keep her alive, but she was Edward’s responsibility first and foremost, and when it came to it you decreed that she be turned. With the sheriff, well, he is dead now, it is out of this world. Renesmée, as you say, no one actually broke any laws. As for this pesky trouble with the human police, none of that is your fault.

Carlisle, if you ever irrevocably and unequivocally broke the law, I would… act accordingly. I’ve proven as much,» he drew in a deep breath, shaking his head lightly from side to side. «Duty must come before my personal preferences, and Caius is wrong to suspect I would have it otherwise. So are my countless critics, and so are you.»

He wasn’t using his usual endearments for Carlisle. There was none of the affectionate words and references woven into his sentences in countless languages, many of which Carlisle knew but some that he didn’t, and all of them on some level ridiculous, that Carlisle had gotten used to from his old friend. However, it seemed Aro made up for it by saying his name all the more reverently. 

Like a prayer.

Looking into Aro’s eyes, that vibrant, expressive red shrouded by the veil of the years gone by, his whole-hearted, deep sincerity and desire to be believed was past questioning. For all his unresolved misgivings, Carlisle couldn’t disbelieve him.

He was laying himself too bare for that, and more…

Whatever Aro’s intentions were, his desire to repair their frayed relationship could not be denied. He had thrown everything aside to rush to Carlisle’s aid the second he called, and now he was admitting to anything at all in the hopes of uncovering the right combination of words that would make Carlisle trust him again.

He was desperate.

Carlisle moved wordlessly past Aro to sit in the chair he’d vacated.

Was there hope?

He had no trust in Aro anymore, and his once unparalleled esteem for him had fallen flat on its face.

But…

There was no denying that counting Aro as his friend again would be a huge reassurance for his family. His children spoke of the Volturi like Aro was the sword of Damocles hanging over them all. He doubted Edward would be content because Carlisle had made peace with Aro, his distrust of the Volturi ran too deep for that. However, once this business was done, it would only be polite for Carlisle to invite the Volturi over to thank them. Regardless of the state his relationship with Aro was in by then, getting to interact with these high-ranking Volturi in a civil setting would, if nothing else, serve to make his family see the Volturi as something other than the looming threat they did now.

Aro could be irresistibly charming when he wanted to be.

And it wasn’t like Aro wouldn’t benefit from getting the leader of the one coven that could threaten his power back under his fold. And if Bella came to consider members of the Volturi her friends, she would not easily be made to hurt them.

But Aro would have seen from his thoughts already that Carlisle would never turn on him, so there was no true need for this sort of diplomatic behavior.

No, Aro was doing this for his own sake, because whatever went through his unknowable mind, he had weighed his options and concluded that he would not be bereft of Carlisle in his life.

Perhaps in time, Carlisle could forgive the things that had happened.

Trust, though…

Trust was invaluable to Carlisle, and Aro had wasted this. Rather spectacularly at that.

Even if Carlisle were to reach out a hand, it would only be a simile of what had once been. A limping, halting, remnant, rather than the splendid thing that it once was.

«Not everything can be repaired,» he finally said. «And we are one such thing. But…» He exhaled, closing his eyes briefly as he searched his mind.

After a moment, he opened them again. Aro was sitting on one knee in front of him, his face unbearably expectant, terrified of whatever Carlisle was about to say, his slender fingers tangled up in each other as he restrained himself from reaching out to touch.

«We obviously care about each other,» Carlisle continued in that quiet, hesitant tone.

He reached out with a hand to brush aside a hair that had gone astray on Aro’s head to buy himself time to think. Aro stood very still.

He didn’t want to give Aro false hope.

He didn’t want to give himself false hope, either.

He drew breath, and looked at Aro askance.

There was one more thing he had to know before he committed to anything.

«The phone call,» he said quietly. «Why did you say what you said about my son?» He asked.

Aro looked sharply up into his eyes. «Because I believed it,» he replied, without missing a beat. No human could have replied so quickly.

Carlisle just looked at him, at that ancient, otherworldly, vivid face.

«I think it’s about time you tell me exactly what you believed about my son,» he said.

Aro’s eyes flickered away, looking anywhere in the room other than at Carlisle. «My dearest Carlisle,» he said, his voice low but intense, «you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.»

His eyes snapped up to meet Carlisle’s, and Carlisle was surprised at the fire in them. «I was wrong about him turning Bella. I underestimated him, and now- well, I have nothing to go on, do I?» He laughed quickly, bitterly. «He exceeded my expectations!»

«Aro, what…»

But Aro only trailed off, and stared silently at Carlisle. His eyes were still, indecipherable, more like the empty yet somehow expressive gaze of an ancient statue than the eyes of a living thing.

He looked his age, for once.

«I think,» he eventually said, «that all I can do is let this happen. Whatever it will be. I can’t warn you, because I don’t know what will happen, and you wouldn’t believe me anyway. No, all I can do is… let fate unfold itself. And hope I won’t regret it.»

Well, that was about the least reassuring thing Carlisle had ever heard.

«I see…» he said after several long seconds had passed and it became clear that Aro wasn’t going to add to that. «Do you want me to blindfold you… stick you in a temple somewhere? Smoke up some incense? Because so far as oracle impersonations go, that was pretty decent.»

When at a loss for anything else to say, Carlisle had found, apply wit. Except he didn’t come across witty at all, his voice was much too breathless for that. The situation was anything where humor could be applied.

Aro, for once, wasn’t impressed. «As much as I would love to have you blindfold me, I’m trying to tell you that Edward is not who you think he is. I was wrong in my prediction about Bella, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong about this.»

«Who is he, then?» Carlisle retorted.

Aro exhaled slowly. It was obvious that he was searching for just the words he thought would be most believable for Carlisle.

Carlisle huffed lightly under his breath, shaking his head as he leaned back and away.

«I do believe he’s well-intentioned,» Aro finally said. «The trouble is, he doesn’t seem to understand what good intentions are, and his priorities are all wrong. Haven’t you seen how callous he is to your daughter Rosalie?»

«He and Rosalie have never had an easy relationship-» Carlisle began, but Aro cut him off.

«When Rosalie was a newborn, Edward resented her whining about the things she had endured, even though she never said a word aloud. He also thinks you turned her to be his bride. Carlisle, his is a resentful, disquieting, deluded mind.»

Carlisle blinked very quickly several times. «That… that can’t be right.»

«Ask him.»

Carlisle stared at him for a second, then snorted lightly. «Alright, I will. And then when my family starts calling me Doctor Frankenstein, that’ll be on you.»

He doubted Aro was making things up, he was too confident. But something had clearly gotten lost in translation here.

No one would enjoy listening to a rape victim’s haunting memories, and Edward would have been under a constant onslaught. In pettier moments, he might give into irritation. As for thinking Carlisle had turned Rosalie for all the wrong reasons… well, Edward had known Carlisle hoped he would find somebody, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that Edward then found it conspicuous that Carlisle went and turned someone as lovely as Rosalie.

No, asking would only make it look like Aro was onto something.

Aro, meanwhile, was gazing at Carlisle’s face.

«Had I known just how wrong I would end up being, how it would make me look, I never would have said anything. I spoke up because you’re my friend, Carlisle, and I do sincerely believe - no, I know - that your son is dangerous.»

«Funny how I’ve survived a century with this Kevin Khatchadourian under my roof,» Carlisle retorted, too fed up to even humor Aro’s fear mongering. He was nearly tempted to add a quip about crossbows, and Rosalie losing an eye, but held his tongue.

Aro’s lips twisted into an unbecoming grimace. «Well. As long as you understand, Carlisle, that I never wanted to drive a wedge between us.» Then, with a humorless laughter, he added, «If I did, I wouldn’t be pursuing a reconciliation now.»

Carlisle just shook his head.

«You see why I can’t trust you.»

Aro stiffened, and his eyes shone with impatience. «Carlisle-» he began, but Carlisle only shook his head again.

It was becoming clearer and clearer that any attempt at reconciliation would be a terrible idea.

Aro was too stubbornly set on making Carlisle see things his way to truly understand Carlisle’s grievances, and he was either untrustworthy, or had such a terrible sense of judgement that Carlisle couldn’t trust him anyway.

No, this was doomed.

Carlisle could see already how this would likely turn out.

Aro would try too hard to get them back to where they were, while Carlisle would hold on to his grievances. They would both grow resentful, and instead of the quick tearing off of a bandaid it would be a slow, festering wound that hurt them both all the worse with a slow poisoning.

All the same…

Perhaps it would be better, in the long term, to live with this if Carlisle had at least tried, had given it his all.

Perhaps it might even work.

Perhaps, if they didn’t aim to get back what had been lost, but aimed lower, for civility, for being able to give the other a call once every blue moon…

It was depressing just thinking about it, but the one, pale, upside to it was that Aro would still be in his life, however diminished.

Perhaps he should stop analyzing this.

Slowly, Carlisle exhaled, and held out his hand for Aro to take.

Aro’s hand snapped forth to seize like Carlisle had offered him a priceless gem, and he bent his head over it in concentration as he held it for nearly a minute.

When he looked up at last, not letting out Carlisle’s hand, his eyes were like fire, blazing even through the haze.

«I understand that our friendship… it won’t be what it was. But I can make my peace with that, Carlisle, so long as it is not lost entirely.» He drew Carlisle’s hand closer towards himself, as if by holding it tightly enough, he would hold on to Carlisle as well.

Carlisle gazed back at him.

«Then you understand… how tenuous it is when I tell you that I would like to try. If only for my children’s sake.» He floated again the thought of how dearly he wished they didn’t continue living with the fear of the Volturi that they currently did.

Aro nodded energetically. «They’ll fear nothing from me.»

Carlisle stared at Aro, for the first time truly daring to imagine that he could get back something he’d thought lost.

There was no one quite like Aro.

Shared memories aside, the man was more brilliant, fun, and infectiously excited about everything in life, shining so brightly that he put operation lamps to shame.

Carlisle had staked his life on optimism, on hope where there should be none.

Perhaps he should apply that rule to this as well.

He nodded. «I’ll give you another chance,» he told Aro.

The smile that lit up Aro’s face was far from the brightest Carlisle had seen, there was too much melancholia for that. But it was dazzling, and Carlisle could only smile back at him.

«I’m glad, Carlisle, so glad, words don’t suffice.»

He rose from his kneeling position to sit on the bed, his eyes shining with contentment.

Then, the shine dimmed, as something seemed to occur to Aro.

He pursed his lips briefly and looked to Renata, who looked questioningly back. He turned back to Carlisle. 

«I… have for a very long time debated whether or not whether I ought to tell you this, whether it would actually do any good, if oblivion would serve you better or if I owe it to you. But, if I want to rebuild this friendship… regain your trust…»

Carlisle watched as Aro’s fingers danced rhythmically, yet gracefully on the bedspread, and wondered where on earth he was going with this.

Renata, in the background, sat down on the desk with a bored look on her face that she tried vainly to mask with a look of polite disinterest.

«For the sake of transparency,» Aro finally said, nodding to himself. He didn’t look very confident, though.

«Carlisle,» he said, and Carlisle could see the resolve to say what was coming from his eyes, «I believe you have a gift.»

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter will take no time at all, I thought, two days tops. I WAS WRONG. Kudos to The Carnivorous Muffin for being an awesome beta and saving this chapter from a perdition called being bad.
> 
> Believe it or not, but I really do think Aro is a good guy, I just think he has a very unfortunate tendency of appearing extremely shady. I’ve never actually seen Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, but from what I’ve heard, that film is what Meyer accidentally wrote instead of Breaking Dawn.
> 
> In Midnight Sun, Edward reminisces about how Rosalie was the absolute worst when she was a newborn. She wouldn’t stop whining and feeling sorry for herself. He concedes that this was mostly inside her own head. I remind the audience that Rosalie was a teenager who’d very recently been gang raped and murdered. Just… Jesus Christ, Edward.
> 
> Unfortunately Stephenie Meyer isn’t real within the Twilightverse, so she can’t publish Midnight Sun, which means Carlisle can’t read it, which means Aro looks like an ass.
> 
> Also in Midnight Sun is a beautiful moment where Charlie first meets Edward and he just freezes up, his instincts telling him that this is not a human boy. However, that doesn’t make any sense, of course this is a human boy, why wouldn’t he be, so he shoves the silly gut reaction of «NOPE» aside before he’s even fully identified it, and welcomes Edward in. This, according to Edward, is a normal response from humans. That initial, instinctual, gut reaction of prey recognizing predator. Bella thinking they’re all hotties makes her a weirdo with a statue fetish, not the norm. It’s also mentioned in Twilight that Carlisle was only able to live among humans after witches and demons had become a thing of the obsolete past. 
> 
> Vampires are uncanny valley stone people.


	7. Chapter 7

At first, Carlisle burst out laughing.

Then, as he realized he was the only person in the room laughing and Aro was staring at him in full seriousness, his laughter trailed off and he was left to stare dully at Aro for several long seconds.

He had absolutely no idea what Aro was playing at.

«You can’t be serious,» he said.

Aro sighed. «I’m afraid I am.»

Carlisle stared at him for another second. «You think I’ve been walking around with a gift for three hundred years and never noticed? That doesn’t sound like a very powerful gift,» he said.

Carlisle had met more than his fair share of gifted vampires over the years, and they had all realized early on, if not right away, that they weren’t like the others. Even Siobhan had had to admit that things tended to go her way, especially when she really wanted them to. She still hadn’t believed that she was actively manipulating the universe, but she had noticed something. It took the confrontation with the Volturi being resolved peacefully for her to finally start believing.

More, though, gifts were very rare.

A disproportionate amount of vampires had them, and the older the vampire was, the greater the chance that he had a little something extra up his sleeve that had helped him survive this long against other vampires. Few covens survived without having at least one gifted member. This in turn skewed the numbers, made it look like gifts were more common than they really were.

The odds of the average human being gifted was microscopic, and Carlisle had very much been an average human.

Aro just looked at him. «I have good reason to believe this,» he said, but Carlisle cut him off with another laugh before he got any further.

«Oh you do, do you? Well, if you want to try and convince me I have some sort of gift, then I want to guess at what you’re going for,» he said, crossing his legs at the knee and propping his chin up on his knuckle in a faux-pensive look.

«Now,» he continued, even as Aro gave him the world’s most unimpressed glare, as if Carlisle was the one who was being ridiculous, «I’m pretty sure I would have noticed the power to throw fireballs by now, so it can’t be that,» he mused aloud. «Same goes for the power of…» he searched his mind, «turning into a bat. That one would definitely have come up at some point. Or maybe I should suspend myself upside down in a cave. Just to be sure.»

«Carlisle,» Aro murmured, but Carlisle held up a finger, a wide grin spreading across his face.

«The power to change my eye color. You see, yesterday they were black-»

Aro actually rolled his eyes at that. Of course, he made the insolent gesture look like a fluid, enchanting movement.

«Yes, quite funny, now if you would let me explain-» Aro tried again while Carlisle laughed softly at his own joke.

In Carlisle’s defense, there wasn’t much else to do but laugh.

Here they were, mere minutes since they’d had the worst fight in Carlisle’s existence, and that was including the half forgotten flashes of those he had with his father, and a centuries-long relationship had nearly been destroyed for good. And the first thing Aro did was to try and make Carlisle believe he had a hidden superpower.

The man was unbelievable.

Carlisle had no gift and that was all there was to it. Some vampires did take time to realize they had one, but centuries? Carlisle would have noticed by now if there was something more to him.

«If you’re quite done,» Aro paused, in case Carlisle wanted to interrupt him again.

Carlisle tried to think of anything else, but there was really no topping the eye color joke. That one was funny, even if Aro hadn’t laughed.

He’d have to find an organic way to recycle it to Rosalie. She’d love it.

Aro, meanwhile, continued. «I noticed in Volterra how charming you were. There was no one you couldn’t get along with if you put your mind to it, not even Caius. The maidens in the castle were never afraid of you. But, I thought that was simply because you were - well - _you_.» Aro smiled fondly.

«You were extraordinary in so many ways, singling out this particular talent would have been like choosing a single gem from a vault of treasures.»

Carlisle was unimpressed.

He should have guessed that Aro would go for something along these lines.

There had been several vampires who looked at his golden-eyed family, at Jasper with his scars now caring about human life, at Emmett with his love for physical strength choosing to be malnourished, and winked at Carlisle, _I see what you’ve done here_ . They were just as surprised each time Carlisle denied having any gifts for persuading people, some even winking at him again, _your secret’s safe with me_.

Carlisle had been getting this nonsense since he first turned Edward, and as the coven grew it had only gotten worse.

It was a running gag at this point, that Carlisle was secretly mind-controlling his family into heeding the animal diet. «Make him stop, Bella!» Emmett would laugh, «We want that sweet human blood.» And then they’d all laugh.

It was insulting, the idea that Carlisle had influenced his family to make them value human life. Edward, Alice, and Jasper had freely chosen this way of life in spite of knowing what they were missing, and the whole family cherished being able to live for something more than skulking around in the woods.

Besides, if Carlisle did have any such gift, Aro himself would have been on the diet. Sulpicia, too. To say nothing of Siobhan, Zafrina and her coven, Alistair, Garrett… Carlisle had tried to convert them all, and failed each time. Carlisle was evidently not the common denominator in making people choose a different life.

Aro’s smile faded into something more serious as he took in Carlisle’s dubious expression. 

«May I?» He asked, holding out a hand.

Carlisle had no particular thoughts to share, and demonstrably clasped his hands together in his lap. Aro nodded in acceptance.

«It was when I touched Edward’s hand that my suspicion went from a passing fancy to undeniable fact. His gift allows him to observe in real time how everyone around you responds to you, and while he has not caught on, my outside perspective made it impossible to overlook.

And now, now that I’ve seen centuries of how you interact with the world, or rather, how the world interacts with you…» Aro trailed off, his eyes lowered as he gazed pensively upon Carlisle’s folded hands.

Aro held up a hand, and as he started listing his findings he tapped each finger. «Humans don’t fear you. As a doctor you meet humans in their weakest, most vulnerable moments, and not one of them has ever flinched from your touch. Carlisle, tell me, have you ever had a patient dislike you?»

«Plenty have refused treatment-» Carlisle began, but Aro shook his head.

«Over religious convictions or distrust of medicine. And even then, you’ve persuaded many who would otherwise have curled up to die. My question was, has a patient ever disliked _you_?»

Carlisle opened his mouth, and closed it.

A smile spread across Aro’s lips. «Has anyone ever requested another doctor? And patients who fell in love with you and had to tend their broken hearts don’t count.»

«I’m young-looking, attractive, and generally pleasant. That alone-»

«You’re a vampire!» Aro cut him off with a laugh. «We look like gods, humans know to fear us even if they don’t know why. Your patients should scream in terror, the children especially. And even if your gift was merely to not scare people off, no human should be comfortable discussing their bowel movements with the most beautiful man in the world, yet they all line up.»

In the background, Renata made a profoundly revolted face. She raised a finger and opened her mouth, about to ask a question, before she thought better of it. She closed her mouth, and threw a look at the door.

Carlisle suspected she regretted having insisted on joining this meeting. Things had gotten very emotional between him and Aro, he wouldn’t have wanted to be the third person in the room for that. But, then, it spoke volumes that Aro even allowed her to be there in the first place. Carlisle couldn’t imagine anybody else in the guard being granted that level of proximity to something so private.

She’d been with them often too, in Volterra, when Aro and Carlisle would spend whole weeks at a time in Aro’s vast library. She’d be there, reading poetry a few tables away so as to give them privacy, not because Aro needed her protection or for any other conceivable pragmatic reason, but because her place was by his side and it was where she wanted to be. That, to Renata, seemed to be all there was to it.

Still, Carlisle suspected she would have preferred to not have to sit in on this particular conversation.

He turned his attention back to Aro. «My children get along with humans just fine when they want to. We wouldn’t be able to live like we do otherwise.»

Aro only shook his head at him. «Not the same thing. We can all get along with humans if we want to, apart from Sulpicia that is, but you don’t have to make an effort. The humans still won’t like us, they won’t trust us and they certainly won’t feel safe around us. Your children are no exception to this. And yet, the humans feel safe around you.

I suspect that if your children were on their own, without you, the human charade wouldn’t last a day.»

«I try very hard to be reassuring, precisely because I don’t want them to fear me-» Carlisle tried, but Aro waved a dismissive hand. On anyone else that would have been an insolent motion, but the grace with which Aro carried himself in his every little move made even something so little as a wave of a hand look like a ripple of water, or a cloth blowing in a wind.

«I’ve seen people flee from Renata. Even Jane, she’s the most precious little vampire I ever saw, yet her most angelic smiles still leave the humans quivering in fright.» 

Carlisle raised his eyebrows. Jane’s features were too sharp and well-proportioned to ever pass for a normal child. She was beautiful, but unsettling. Aro saw Jane quite differently from how the rest of the world saw her.

«Your best efforts should still fall short,» Aro continued, «yet in over two centuries practicing as a doctor they never have. But I have other examples.

Carlisle, when you gathered your witnesses, some of them were admittedly there for their own sakes, but several of them came just for you. The Irish, the Amazonians, Alistair, Garrett - they were all ready to lay down their lives for you.»

«You want to cheapen that by saying I used mind control on them?» Carlisle deadpanned.

«No! No,» Aro quickly refuted, «no more than my ability cheapens how well I know a person. It simply means I have an extra resource. You know our theory on gifts, Carlisle… your theory, really.»

Yes, gifts…

There were few things they hadn’t discussed together over the years Carlisle spent in Volterra, ranging from great philosophical questions to «why don’t we thirst for women’s menstrual blood?» (the latter was one of the very few matters they had decided against investigating in Aro’s laboratory). They had even vivisected Carlisle in a Roman bath in the name of science.

But there were few things they had discussed more than gifts. Their nature, their form, their potential, their limitations… Aro had seen more gifts than anyone in the world, and he had never been able to make sense of their origin.

Some gifts appeared to be genetic, as some relatives would have gifts that clearly complemented or resembled one another. However, other biologically related vampires would have gifts so different, Aro saw no connection at all. Some vampires had gifts that appeared correlated to trauma they had endured, some had gifts that seemed an exaggeration of who they had been in life, and others yet had gifts that appeared completely random. Some had been ordinary humans, others had had early manifestations of their powers, others yet had had manifestations of power unrelated to what they wielded as vampires.

There was no universal denominator to what determined a vampire’s gift. And it had been driving Aro to his wit’s end for millennia.

It was in this matter that Carlisle’s background as a seventeenth century Christian finally became good for something.

He posited the idea that perhaps gifted vampires had been something akin to witches in life. It was apparent they hadn’t made any deals with the Devil (and Aro would always side eye him when he brought up the Devil, _you don’t still believe He exists, no? We’ve moved past that…_ and slide a hand across the table to not-so-subtly check while Carlisle rolled his eyes at him), yet they possessed power most humans did not.

«It’s well known that many vampires experienced some manifestation of their gift in life…» Aro had begun, but Carlisle had shaken his head.

«You told me Jane and Alec have their gifts because of the way they died. Well, they had attracted your attention before that, hadn’t they? And the things they did had nothing to do with pain or numbness. Isn’t it fair to assume, that had they not been burned at the stake, their gifts would have been different?»

He had been certain Aro had thought as much as well, and had lightly tapped the older vampire’s nose tip with his finger to let him know he was only making a point. A small smile had lurked upon Aro’s lips as he’d settled back in his chair, to better regard Carlisle as he made his argument.

«It’s not much of a common denominator, but it sounds like the thing these former humans shared was their potential. For those who never had a particular need, the gift simply became an enhancement of who they were or what they could do. And then those who had a particular need or trauma saw their original gift overwritten, the better to serve them in their new life.

Humans are gifted, but their gifts haven’t settled yet and can be cancelled out.

It would at the very least explain why some relatives have radically different gifts. Jane could have been burned and not Alec, and then there would have been no resemblance.»

Aro had stared at him, and stared, and then turned his head to look at Renata, who’d put down her book to stare at Carlisle. She’d looked stricken, but before Carlisle could ask she had darted out of the library.

Aro had been left lost in thought, and he’d looked torn between stunned and outraged.

His eyes had been wide, too, as the implications of Carlisle’s theory, that gifts could be manipulated, sank in.

«I spend millennia analyzing this matter, and you just… walk in…»

Carlisle had grinned at him. It sounded like Aro had overanalyzed it a bit, and he was happy to simplify. 

And a little smug, he’d admit.

Back in the present, Carlisle was staring dully at Aro. «If you’re working your way up to the reveal that my superpower is disappearing into a pile of potatoes, I must remind you that that’s Afton.»

Aro’s lip twitched. «Don’t I wish he would. No, Carlisle, I mean that I think your gift is… goodness.»

Carlisle raised his eyebrow. «Has this been the world’s most roundabout way of complimenting me? That’s original, Aro, even for you.»

«I’m not the one who was just contemplating how my face is proof of God’s existence.»

Carlisle opened his mouth to counter that, but received such an odd look from Renata that he closed it again. «He’s taking it out of context, I was…» he explained awkwardly before trailing off.

«Oh - it’s alright, you don’t have to include me in the conversation,» Renata said hurriedly, holding up a small hand as she shook her head. «Please don’t,» she added, and it was meant to be polite, but there was a bit too much feeling in it.

Aro ducked his head and snickered soundlessly, and Carlisle felt his own lips twitch. He shook his head, and mimicked zipping his mouth shut for her before he turned his attention back to Aro. 

«What I meant,» Aro tried again, «is that in all the millennia I’ve lived, I’ve never come across anybody, not even a whisper, of someone who would make the choices you have. As a newborn, no less. And then again, and again, for centuries, never letting up.»

Carlisle gave him a dull look. «You know, I have this coven, there’s eight of us-»

Aro waved a dismissive hand. «You’re the only one in your family who values life for the sake of life itself. The others do it because you set them on that path, and because it gives them a superiority complex. Except for Jasper, but his gift is effectively a shock collar for him, he didn’t choose your way of life out of the goodness of his heart.»

Carlisle gaped at him.

He was certain Aro genuinely wished to rekindle their friendship. This entire conversation could have been avoided, came with painful and dangerous admissions on Aro’s end, and had been too raw to be anything else.

Carlisle had assumed that Aro, like Carlisle, also meant this as a reconciliation of their covens.

It had seemed obvious, Carlisle’s coven was very large and very gifted. With only a month’s notice, Carlisle had been able to summon dozens of gifted witnesses who were not unprepared for a fight. Aro had admitted that Caius regarded Carlisle, his entire coven, with suspicion.

And while Carlisle was his own person, he was also very much a Cullen.

To a man who all but ruled the supernatural world and wanted to stay in power forever, Carlisle’s friendship was nice, but making an ally of the Cullens was nicer.

Yet, in a few short sentences, Aro made it perfectly clear that he held the whole coven, all but Carlisle himself, in the lowest possible regard.

Carlisle had seen Aro go out of his way to be unfailingly gracious, polite, and above all understanding to the world around him. Due to the nature of his gift, and the nature of mankind, Aro rarely judged people for what he gleaned from their minds. Friends, enemies, and those about to be executed all had a reason for being the way they were that only they, and Aro, could possibly understand.

Aro had only ever touched Edward, Alice, and now Carlisle. Edward… Carlisle was still uncertain what Aro had meant about Edward, except that it was something monstrous, and that Aro must be somehow mistaken. Yet, perhaps through knowledge of their thoughts through Edward’s gift, or perhaps simply through Alice and Carlisle’s memories, he had decided that the rest of the family was something to be dismissed.

Aro, it appeared, had no intention of reconciling himself with the Cullens as a whole. Only Carlisle.

He looked at all they had suffered and sacrificed, the strength it took for them to get through each day, and saw nothing more than a superiority complex.

Carlisle choked back the urge to hiss at the man again, but beneath his hands the armrests of his chair crumbled.

«You know I’m right,» Aro said dismissively with another wave of his hand, «or shall I list my reasons? Bella hardly seems to feel the thirst, so I can hardly commend her great sacrifice. Rosalie, Jasper, and Emmett all voted to kill an innocent girl whose crime was being nearly killed by a van, and for such petty motivations as Rosalie not wanting to leave Forks at that. Alice voted because she wanted to have her Barbie Bella, and she follows the diet only because her visions have guided her towards this being the best possible life for her. Esme, she takes no issue with others dying for her loved ones. Did you know she despaired of Bella’s scent tormenting Edward, and would have supported him killing her to ease his pain?» 

Carlisle pursed his lips. «That’s…» the excuse that she was trying to be supportive of Edward, soften the blow for him in the event he lost control so he wouldn’t be quite so distraught should Bella perish by his hand, didn’t quite make it past Carlisle’s lips.

A humorless, knowing smile stretched across Aro’s lips. «And Edward chose to kill humans. He lived like that for years, and regardless of his motives for returning, Carlisle, you would never have done what he did. You didn’t, and you had the whole world beckoning you to give in while he had all the love and support anyone could ask for.

I’m not saying they’re bad people, Carlisle, not at all, nor is their sacrifice meaningless. I admire their commitment,» he spread his hands out wide, «but they are not as noble as you. No one is, Carlisle, of all the people I’ve met in all my life. Not one.»

Carlisle shook his head mutely. «My creator abandoned me, I was in a unique position-» he began, but Aro shook his head.

«Plenty of newborns have been abandoned by their creators, Carlisle, it’s no excuse.

Even if we look past your herculean sacrifice, my dearest Carlisle, you are uniquely noble in your every pursuit in life. You could have dedicated yourself to killing vampires to spare the humans they would kill, but you don’t.»

«Because I would die immediately and that would be a pitiful way to go,» Carlisle shot back, because even if he’d wanted to do that it wouldn’t have worked out for him at all, and Aro laughed, as if he hadn’t just told Carlisle his family didn’t give a damn about human life.

«It’s because you value all life, even the lives of bloodsucking demons. Carlisle, you go around making friends with everyone who crosses your path, you tell us we have souls and that there’s hope for us, and then you flutter off again to be a doctor, because your purpose in life is to make the world a better place.» Aro shook his head fondly. «If you were the only vampire in the world, the name humans gave our species would have been angel.»

«Your gift, Carlisle, is an enhancement of that goodness. You’re a light, drawing the rest of us in like moths. You can befriend anybody at all because there’s no resisting that light, the humans trust you because that light shines through. And with intentions as pure as yours, you become remarkably convincing.

Your gift, Carlisle, allows you to charm anybody you like, to be trusted and adored.»

Carlisle stared at him for several long seconds.

If he brushed aside the oddly poetic spiel, the compliments, Aro was saying he was the best parts of Heidi and Chelsea, able to draw anybody in and compel them as he liked. 

That the people he met didn’t have the option of disliking him, not if he didn’t want them to, and strong relationships would be formed if he was around for long enough.

Ice cold dread filled his stomach.

«I…» he began, trailing off. «I feel as if you just called me a glorified lava lamp,» he said in a weak voice. 

Aro’s lips quirked. «While I’ve missed your humor, I’m starting to long for Marcus’ company.»

«Well, there’s your proof that I have no gift,» Carlisle laughed, sounding a bit forced. «You don’t seem particularly charmed, in fact, you’ve laughed at none of my jokes.»

Aro flashed a brilliant smile.. «I like you as much as I possibly can, lover. I can still find you obstinate.»

Carlisle only shook his head. «You haven’t offered anything in the way of proof. Pointing out that I have friends is… well, if we walk down this route, there won’t be a vampire left in the world who doesn’t have a gift.»

Aro huffed. «Alistair hid in an English forest for seven centuries, he didn’t even want us to know he existed. Then when you call, he crosses the planet to witness against us.» Carlisle opened his mouth to interject, but Aro was faster, «The fact that his self-preservation got the better of him is a happy thing, it means your influence is limited. You make people stretch as far as they will go, but no further.»

«Alistair has no other friends-» Carlisle began.

Once again Aro cut him off. «You’re proving my point! Alistair is terrified of his own shadow, yet he let you live in his cave and catch him up on English history for months. And how many of your friends does this apply to? I haven’t touched Amun since, oh, it’s been nine centuries already.» He paused to frown in befuddlement as he realized how much time had slipped by. «I should check up on him. My point is, he’s not someone who makes friends easily, yet you get a solid gold sarcophagus. I imagine one of the very few treasures left to him after years living in squalor. And had the Amazonian women ever left their land before you asked?»

«They didn’t have reason to,» Carlisle replied lamely.

Aro hmm-ed and nodded. «And then there’s me. I do adore you, Carlisle. There are many I’ve adored over the years, but you I adore in every way, and you remain the only person I’ve ever been able to consider a true friend.» He smiled wistfully, for a moment appearing lost in memory.

He abruptly sobered, whichever lane his memories had wandered down it had not been one he wanted to continue walking. «You’ve never made an enemy in your life. When your coven does make an enemy, it’s over something you couldn’t help, such as James. Oh, and there’s the delightful Quileute shapeshifters. They thought vampires were ruthless demons when they first encountered your family, and their people had been persecuted by white men for centuries. Yet you, the whitest male demon they had ever seen, were able to sit everyone down around a table to discuss a peace treaty!» He laughed at the absurdity of it. «Only you, dear friend, only you.»

Carlisle stared.

The feeling of dread in his stomach was spreading like cancer.

Aro made compelling arguments.

It was true that humans didn’t fear him. They never had, and they feared even Esme, the kindest, sweetest, and warmest vampire he had ever met. She even retained some of the softness of her human features. The symmetrical perfection was undeniable, but her angles were rounded, her sharp edges smoothed over.

Humans recoiled all the same.

No one ever recoiled from Carlisle.

The rest could be explained, Amun and Alistair were both complicated but ultimately lonely people, Carlisle had merely been in the right place and said the right things, and the Amazonians were amazing women who would have done the same for anybody they considered a friend. 

As for Aro himself, well, the man had found many interesting ways of expressing his devotion to Carlisle over the years, but this was a new one.

No, there were reasonable explanations for the rest, and it sounded like Aro had fallen into the trap of confirmation bias. He had started to suspect, and with that every meaningful relationship Carlisle had with anybody became further proof of a fabricated gift.

Carlisle would have to figure out what made him so different to the humans, but he still didn’t think a gift was quite it. If he had one, it was weak and certainly not anything close to what Aro was implying.

He leaned forwards, and clasped one of Aro’s hands between both of his. Aro blinked slowly, a particular gesture for when he wasn’t absorbing quite enough thoughts to warrant closing his eyes entirely.

Slowly, he exhaled, and Carlisle let his hands fall away. «It’s a tough gift to prove, Carlisle, and to be quite frank, it makes no difference to me if you believe it or not. But it makes a difference to you, and if I want you to ever trust me again, the first step is transparency.»

Carlisle’s eternally twenty-three-year-old brain felt like making the argument that Aro was here displaying an undeniable gift for smooth-talking, but he held his tongue.

«What about Eleazar?» He asked instead. «He’s known me for decades, he never said anything.»

Renata huffed in the background. Aro smiled dryly, evidently sharing the sentiment. «Pardon my bluntness, I’m aware your covens are close - but Eleazar is useless.»

«Oh, no,» Carlisle said mournfully, and flinched on Eleazar’s behalf.

He’d always thought it was strange that Eleazar had to choose between Carmen and the Volturi.

The Volturi had more than enough room. More damningly, Aro was infamously polite, to the point where he at times couldn’t bring himself to be straight with people. Carlisle had been the incredulous witness to several such interactions, such as the time Aro couldn’t bear to tell Sulpicia she was more petrified than he was, and he ended up blaming the poor lightning in the tower.

The tower had been flooded with candles and oil lamps, easily the brightest part of the castle.

Somehow that had worked.

No, Aro’s ultimatum had sounded funny to Carlisle, but with a gift as useful as Eleazar’s he had assumed there was information he was missing.

Well, it seemed there was.

«Oh, yes,» Aro said, still smiling dryly. «He could tell me if someone had a gift if it was a very powerful, and easily distinguishable gift. Jane, for instance, he spotted her right away. And most of my guard have such powerful, distinct gifts, so I was led to believe he would be able to detect any gift he came across.

Well, not only was he useless with humans, but he missed countless gifts. Heidi, for instance, he thought she was wonderfully appealing, and I had to tell him she was gifted for him to realize this was in fact the case.

I thought he needed training, that he was merely unpracticed, but he never improved.

There came a point where I realized that his power was essentially to point out the obvious.»

Carlisle’s lips turned downwards as he realized that this did sound familiar.

Eleazar had missed Siobhan, whose gift had been obvious for all that she denied it. He missed Bella as well, he hadn’t seen any sign of gifts in her and decided this meant she was a shield based on Edward telling him she was a shield. So far as deductions went, Carlisle had not been impressed.

He did spot Edward, Jasper, and Alice the moment he met them, but it had taken him several minutes of squinting quizzically and asking questions to deduce just what Jasper could do.

Still… for Aro to essentially sneak-evict the man seemed a bit harsh.

«You couldn’t use him to train recruits?» Carlisle asked. «He did excellent work training Bella.»

Aro hummed. «You want to answer that, Renata?»

Carlisle raised his eyebrows.

Renata was far from the meek, personalityless shadow most people took her to be, but for Aro to ask her to pitch in in the conversation like this was unusual. He’d certainly never done it in Volterra.

Renata didn’t look surprised, though. She closed her book, and in an instant she was sitting next to Aro, the skirt of her dress arranged neatly around her thin legs.

She looked fierce, like she had been waiting for this moment. Like a part of Renata was always waiting for the moment to lay into Eleazar.

Perhaps not so surprising. Carlisle imagined Eleazar hadn’t endeared himself to anybody in the Volturi when he joined Carlisle’s not-quite-army of witnesses.

«For lack of a more polite term,» Renata said in her high, bell-like voice, «Eleazar was a cad.»

Aro lit up at her choice of words.

«A cad, Renata, really, such language. I despair of you,» he chastised her with a glowing smile, shaking his head in mock disapproval. 

Carlisle thrilled a high laughter, which he quickly muffled as he remembered there were humans nearby.

Renata waited patiently for them both to settle down before continuing. «Eleazar made it clear rather early on that he thought he was… in another league than us. His gift was to evaluate the gifts of others, and so he thought he could evaluate us in turn.» She pursed her lips.

«I wanted to regard him more charitably, I really did. I get along with Afton, I should have been able to get along with Eleazar as well.» She pouted. It seemed to truly bother her that she hadn’t been able to do this. «I even asked Chelsea’s help.»

Renata paused, chewing lightly on the inside of her cheek, her large red eyes that he suspected had been brown in her previous life gazing somberly into his. «Eleazar saw us as our gifts, and nothing more. He went on countless missions with the guard and yet all he saw was what they could do. He barely spoke to them. He was like that with all of us, but the twins, Chelsea, Demetri, and myself especially were… well, I think it speaks for itself that the only times he would refer to Jane and Alec by their given names was when he was talking about their specific gifts. Otherwise it was _the twins_.»

She shook her head.

«I tried to reach out to him every now and then, but he’d inevitably turn the conversation towards my gift. And I valued his input, I’d be happy to more efficiently protect you, master,» she flashed a fond smile at Aro, who smiled back, «but there came a point where I couldn’t deny he wasn’t interested in me, or anybody else in the guard, as a person.»

Aro hummed in quiet agreement. «Eleazar meant well, but you are quite correct, dear.»

Renata pursed her lips in quiet consternation. Aro patted her knee in camaraderie, and turned his attention back to Carlisle. «You see why, when Eleazar announced to me that he had found his mate… it was a golden opportunity, and no hurt feelings. The man had every good intention, he simply wasn’t the fit for the Volturi I’d hoped he would be.»

Carlisle sighed. «Do you mind if I tell him? His self-confidence won’t like it, but…»

If he put it the right way, Eleazar’s feelings wouldn’t be too hurt.

By the sounds of it, he’d been the wrong person in the wrong place. Chelsea or not, the Volturi were still very much a coven, and there wasn’t a coven on the planet that didn’t have its own strange little insider culture. The bigger and the older, the more intense internal these things would get, and no coven was bigger than the Volturi, few covens older. As a result, they had… well, they had a very particular culture.

And Eleazar, bless him, but his social intelligence did leave something to be desired.

Yes, Carlisle could all too easily see how things had gotten to a point where the rest of the guard hated him, and Aro jumped on the chance to part with Eleazar on good terms.

«But he’s been worried in recent years about that evil Chelsea abducting him in the dead of night,» Aro finished for Renata.

Renata raised a fine brow at that. «She’ll be delighted to hear that.» She bit her lip, and touched Aro’s hand lightly.

Aro laughed. «Go ahead,» he said, and Renata grinned, fishing out a phone from her pocket. Her fingers flew over the buttons as she typed out a text.

Carlisle spared a moment to appreciate the absurdity of the Volturi communicating with such modern means. Phone calls were a necessity, but there was something so incredibly mundane about Renata casually texting with other Volturi. From what he could see of her screen, Chelsea’s name was sandwiched between emojis on each side, hearts and a little yellow face with small fangs.

They probably had a group chat, he realized dazedly.

Once again, he reminded himself that he was a seventeenth century priest who drove a Mercedes.

After a couple of seconds, Renata’s phone buzzed. She grinned, and held the screen up for Aro and Carlisle to see. «Afton porterò. Nessuno ci accorgerà,» it said. _I’ll bring Afton. No one will see us coming._ and Renata returned to sit on the dresser, where she texted a reply.

It seemed Aro had been wise to allow Renata to join. Carlisle couldn’t stay mad at anybody when someone as lovely as that woman was lighting up the room.

«I still don’t buy this about a gift,» he said softly. «Maybe you believe it, but…» he shrugged. «I would have noticed by now.»

Aro gazed at him contemplatively. «How could you? Carlisle, if I’m correct, and I do believe that I am, then you have never had a normal interaction with anybody.

You live in a world, Carlisle, where everyone is always willing to hear you out, anyone can be reasoned with, and they will come around if you keep talking for long enough. Does that sound familiar?»

«I begged for Bree’s life. Jane did not budge.»

«It happened too quickly, I have every confidence it would have worked if you kept going. As it is, that she… hm.» He cut himself off, shaking his head, before continuing, a bit too hurriedly. Carlisle frowned, wondering where that had been headed. But Aro steamrolled on before Carlisle could inquire, «You made a newborn surrender to you in the middle of battle. When you first met James and his coven, yours and Jasper’s combined efforts successfully put them at ease. Even Victoria’s paranoia was soothed by your gentle manner, Carlisle, is that not peculiar to you?

Not to mention this very weekend. Carlisle, your eyes became a glowing, solid, red overnight, and while I find your excuse delightful, the humans accept it a bit too readily. And the sheriff, Carlisle, you walked in there and started making small talk about being the new guy in a small town. His response was to confide in you sensitive information about the case. That, Carlisle, is not normal. None of this is.

Make all the excuses you like, Carlisle, but you must realize I’m onto something.»

Carlisle just stared at him, silent.

He didn’t have an explanation, not right now anyway.

Still…

There was just no way.

He brushed a hand against Aro’s cheek, and Aro groaned in frustration. «You are infuriatingly stubborn!» He complained. «But I’m glad I haven’t insulted you beyond belief.»

Carlisle just smiled humorlessly.

Aro sighed lightly, suddenly restless. «I suppose it’s time for me to go have a look at those policemen who are giving you trouble.» He pressed Carlisle’s hand closer to his face as he was wont to do when he had to leave, an easy way for him to see if the person he was talking to had anything further to say, before he nodded to himself and rose, letting Carlisle have his hand back. 

«Renata?» Aro asked as he floated towards her, flipping his phone open with one hand.

Carlisle rose as well and followed. He should put on some outdoor clothes as well.

Aro texted something quick, and Renata jumped down with a smile. In a quick, deft movement she’d twisted some of her hair into a flawless bun on top of her head, and she accepted the hat Aro handed her with a smile, pinning it neatly into place. It was the same color as her dress.

Carlisle frowned, looking for where the hat had come from. «Where…» he began, but Aro just winked.

«What do magicians never reveal?» He asked.

Carlisle, meanwhile, was distracted by Renata’s hat.

It was a stylish, neat hat with little fuzzy balls along the rim, the gravity-defying kind that had been so popular earlier in the previous century.

And if the Volturi had brought hats… 

«You actually brought the funny hats,» Carlisle stated dully as he pulled his own, practical, normal-looking hat down to cover his ears.

«Well, of course,» Aro said, looking almost offended at the implication that he wouldn’t. «How could I decide to visit Alice with them if they were still in Volterra? Demetri has them.»

Carlisle suspected safety wasn’t the only reason Caius didn’t want Aro to join the Volturi guard on missions.

He also had a sudden suspicion that Aro had brought along a hat for him as well, and that by the end of the weekend he would be wearing it.

«I’d ask how you ever managed to intimidate the vampire world into submission, but I suppose that’s what Caius is for,» he simply said.

«Got it in one. Mind if we leave the cloaks?»

Carlisle nodded, and spared a moment to fold them into his bag in case any policemen got ahead of themselves. He then put on a jacket, and followed Aro and Renata out of the window.

Aro fished two pairs of matching sunglasses out of nowhere, handing one set to Renata and placing the other on himself.

«You’re never passing as human.» Carlisle told him candidly.

«Yes, well, the haze makes me look blind. Or dead. It’s called damage control,» Aro said, shrugging, the movement fluidly graceful, like water.

«Master,» a xylophone soprano sounded, and Carlisle looked up to see Jane walking towards them.

She’d discarded her Volturi robe as well, and Carlisle was amused to see that she was trying to look less like she was auditioning for _The Shining_ , and more like a twenty-first century preteen girl. Unfortunately it seemed she had gotten lost somewhere in the 90’s punk scene, so she was wearing black jeans, black boots, a black leather jacket, and a fuzzy black beret that Carlisle imagined was a nod to the cold weather. She looked like she was auditioning for _Léon._

«Jane! Just on time,» Aro exclaimed happily, and clapped his hands.

Jane smiled beatifically, belying her very _Matrix_ outfit. «You summoned me,» she answered.

«Indeed,» Aro nodded. «Renata and I are going to do a bit of, ah, reconnaissance, and I had hoped that you, my dear, wouldn’t mind escorting our dear Carlisle in the meantime.»

«What?» Jane said at the same time as Carlisle sharply asked «Excuse me?»

«Carlisle, dearest, you have quite the penchant for getting yourself into trouble. You’ll allow me this little precaution,» Aro explained, waving a hand as if it could dismiss Carlisle’s very real objections.

Carlisle frowned in the nanosecond before it dawned on him.

«You want to prove I have a gift using Jane,» he realized aloud.

Aro grinned shamelessly. «Acute as always, my clever friend.»

Jane’s eyes widened. «Carlisle has a gift?»

«I don’t,» Carlisle said hurriedly.

«I think he does,» Renata mused airily, and Aro grinned at her.

«Prove it using me how?» Jane frowned.

«Indulge me,» Aro told Carlisle, and before Carlisle could protest, he and Renata were both gone.

Leaving Carlisle with Jane.

«So,» Jane said after a few seconds, looking every bit as awkward as Carlisle felt.

«Hm,» Carlisle replied.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As some of my readers might have noticed, my answers to comments are getting embarrassingly long. So if you wonderful people have questions, thoughts, or general somethings you want to talk to me about, come find me on my tumblr, therealvinelle.tumblr.com.
> 
> As for Eleazar, I found it really weird that he lived with the Volturi for years, and yet he’s so incredibly impersonal when he talks about the twins and Renata. Of course it wasn’t the right occasion for him to start reminiscing about the good old times, but there just wasn’t a trace of anything other than professional curiosity in his description of people he worked with for years. Not to mention Aro is a guy who killed his baby sister to keep Marcus from leaving. If Eleazar was usual to the Volturi then Carmen would have been allowed to stay. Or Didyme’d.
> 
> The Carnivorous Muffin is a fantastic beta who saved you poor souls from some truly bad jokes in this chapter. It was bad. Praise be to the Muffin.


	8. Chapter 8

«So… you’re gifted, huh.» Jane said to fill the silence.

They would still have been standing in the alley behind the hotel, staring mutely at each other, if a young woman hadn’t steered into the alley, made eye contact with Jane, and immediately changed directions.

Now they were wandering the streets aimlessly, Carlisle keeping his red eyes downcast while Jane fished a large set of round black sunglasses out of her jacket. They took up nearly half her face.

Carlisle wondered what Aro had been thinking.

Jane was one of the only Volturi members that Carlisle had never encountered while in Volterra. The Volturi was a busy organization, more so than usual when the European witch hunts made vampires think they had leeway with the law, and the guard rarely left Volterra without at least one twin.

The only times the two had met had been when Jane came purposefully too late to save Carlisle’s family from a newborn army, and when Aro had brought her along with the rest of his guard to execute Carlisle and all his family and friends.

And from what Carlisle had seen and heard of Jane, she took great pride in spending her existence torturing people.

There was using her gift in service of the Volturi, and then there was sadism.

He did not truly dislike her, she was too young for that. All the same, there were certain people Carlisle could go without spending his day with, and Jane was one of them.

He bitterly reflected over these things, as well as just how painfully awkward each second that passed in deafening silence felt, engraving it in his memory. If he had to suffer, then Aro could damn well suffer by proxy when they met again.

«No,» he sighed, «Aro is mistaken.» Well, there was the matter of how humans didn’t seem to fear Carlisle, Aro was right that that was strange.

But Aro’s claims had been much bolder than that.

Jane looked sharply up at him through the sunglasses. «Aro is never wrong about these things. No, you’re gifted. What is it?» She asked, but held up a hand before he could answer, «No, don’t tell me, I want to guess.»

A grin spread across her face. It was entirely too gleeful, yet not at all menacing. Just so very excited, like Alice planning a party.

It seemed guessing gifts was a passion of Jane’s.

Carlisle shrugged. «Just don’t suggest that it’s the power to change my eye color, because that’s my joke.»

«The power to- really?» She made a disgusted face. «That isn’t funny at all. Is it the power to control yourself? Since you’re immune to blood, and your family doesn’t eat anything.»

Carlisle gave her a funny look.

«We do eat things. Animal blood,» he corrected.

«And you’re malnourished because of it. Aro told me your eyes are yellow because your body can’t metabolize the blood properly. Instead of a healthy red, they turn the color of waste liquids.» She smiled. «Urine,» she clarified in a lowered pitch, lowering her glasses briefly so she could make direct eye contact with him.

Carlisle mentally groaned at Aro. 

He should have known the man would tell everyone about that particular theory.

He was sure Aro hadn’t even done it to mock Carlisle either, he was much too decent for that. No, the man simply enjoyed talking, about anything and everything, and apparently Carlisle’s eyes being yellow because of urine was one such topic. Carlisle could imagine it had turned into one of Aro’s many praises of his character, too. He’d certainly been impressed when he first came up with his theory, fully expecting Carlisle to say «Goodness, that’s disgusting! Fetch me a human at once!», and Carlisle not only gave him an unimpressed stare, but went out into Volterra to eat a few rats, just to prove that no amount of disgust could make him forgo his faith.

This, in turn, had sparked a round of Caius begging Aro to find himself a lover who didn’t eat rats in the sewer, and threatening to join the Romanians when Aro refused.

Either way, it seemed this had become common knowledge among the Volturi guard.

«He told you that, did he? Did he tell you it’s just a theory?»

«Do you have a better theory?» Jane asked with an impish grin, knowing that he didn’t.

It was easy to forget, even with her tiny stature and childlike voice, that Jane was eternally twelve years old. She hadn’t acted like a child in either of their previous encounters. Carlisle suspected this was a conscious decision, that she went out of her way to behave as adult-like as possible so people wouldn’t dismiss her as a child quite so easily.

But right now she was acting every inch the inquisitive child. She was charming, but he knew from dealing with young patients that she would not let this go until he admitted she was right, or gave her a better explanation.

Which he didn’t have.

«No,» he admitted.

Jane lit up.

She was acting surprisingly congenial.

Carlisle was starting to wonder if Jane and Alec had secretly been triplets the whole time, and Carlisle was talking to Jane’s pleasant sister. 

This was not what he’d expected from Jane at all.

When his family had taken a stand against the Volturi, they humiliated them. And no one had been more humiliated than Jane and Alec, who’d been left to throw their gifts uselessly against Bella’s unbreakable barrier while half the vampire world saw how powerless they were.

Carlisle had seen the hateful way Jane glared at Bella that day, seen her desire to unleash her gift upon every last fool who’d dared to stand before the Volturi.

She was too loyal to Aro to outright harm Carlisle when she’d been asked to guard him, but all the same, Carlisle had expected something more akin to being marched through the streets like a convict to the gallows while Jane whispered menacing stories of over a thousand years of killing and torturing vampires and humans alike.

He had not expected her to put the past behind them and make pleasant, civil conversation with him.

She was shockingly mature.

More mature than some of the adult vampires Carlisle had met over the years.

If this was what she was normally like, then he could understand why Aro was so befuddled by humans not being charmed by her.

«Told you. So is it the power to control yourself? That would, oh,» her eyes widened, «that would explain why you made that immortal child. Did you want to prove you could impose control upon one?»

Carlisle gaped at her. 

Jane, twelve-year-old Jane, was really going to bring this into the conversation?

Carlisle would have thought this was a sensitive topic.

Apparently not.

«I did not make an immortal child!» He protested.

Edward had.

Not on purpose, of course, and Renesmée had grown up eventually, but that mess had very much not been Carlisle’s fault.

Jane shrugged, blissfully uncaring of the fact that she herself was, technically, an immortal child.

Of course, Jane wasn’t an immortal child in the way people seemed to believe she was.

Carlisle had had immediate questions when Aro first told him about immortal children, as he knew there were child vampires in the Volturi guard.

On that particular day Jane had been away on an assignment, as she nearly always was. No one put the fear of God in the demon world quite like Jane, and so she was always the first choice for being sent on missions, even before her brother. Alec had just gotten back from a mission, though, and so it had been Alec that Aro had summoned to his chambers that day, along with one of the beautiful maidens the Volturi kept in the castle.

(Carlisle had been greatly amused when he learned Aro had modernized beautiful maidens into hot secretaries. He wasn’t wrong, but something about Aro holding up two sexist archetypes and saying, «Is this not the same thing?», and not being wrong, was funnier than it should have been.)

«An immortal child,» Aro had intoned to Carlisle as Aro walked a circle around the nervous-looking young woman. Her name had been Giulia, and she had some of the loveliest brown eyes Carlisle had ever seen. «Is a vampire who is frozen at too young an age to ever learn control. They can never be taught, nor do they understand why they should be. Alec?»

He’d held out a thin knife, which Alec accepted with a grim look on his youthful face. Giulia had paled, but she obediently held out her hand as Aro indicated.

Slowly, and ever so carefully so as not to draw any more blood than necessary, Alec had drawn a thin line across Giulia’s soft skin with the knife, drawing brilliant red blood that trickled down her wrist, dripping enticingly to the floor.

Carlisle had not yet perfected his own control at the time, and so when Alec’s grip around the knife was suddenly too tight and he crushed its handle, sending the blade clanging to the stone floor, Carlisle could sympathize.

Giulia had been remarkably calm, even when the knife fell. She had been tense, of course, pale and barely daring to breathe, yet she had stood quite tall, showing no indication towards disobeying the vampires around her. Still, Carlisle had decided to shoot her an encouraging smile, and it lowered her shoulders a bit.

«Alec still has room for improvement, I wouldn’t trust him to create a vampire,» Aro had said softly, as he had watched Alec stand stiller than any statue, not daring to breathe but too set on proving himself to step away, «but he has learned control.»

With that, he’d dismissed Alec, who was gone from the room so quickly Carlisle’s eyes had trouble tracking his movement, and offered young Giulia a cloth to stem her bleeding.

Afterwards Aro had picked up the knife’s blade and taken Carlisle to see the true immortal children that had lived for centuries in the deepest catacombs beneath Volterra. As the irresistibly sweet toddlers turned into raging, uncontrollable beasts the instant they spotted the dried blood on the blade, Carlisle understood just why the creation of immortal children was forbidden, punishable by death.

Still, for all that Jane had learned control, as proven by the fact that she was walking calmly along the streets of Whitefish without killing everything in sight, the impish smile on her face was very much the smile of a child who was pleased she’d gotten Carlisle to admit his normal eye color was gross.

«Where is it, anyway?» She asked.

It took Carlisle a second to realize what Jane meant. «You mean Renesmée,» he confirmed, and Jane just gave him a look, as if he was being pedantic.

Well, Carlisle didn’t know, did he?

Renesmée had supposedly gone to visit her grandfather’s grave, as she was wont to do. She had yet to forgive her family for not making Charlie immortal and, to her understanding, letting her grandfather die pointlessly. Spending her weekends with Grandpa Charlie just as she had when he lived had become her passive-aggressive way of making them all sorry. 

And, Carlisle knew even as he was powerless to help, it was the only way a girl who lived with an unchanging, immortal family knew how to deal with grief.

To Renesmée, humanity was what poverty was to rich people. It was a terrible shame others had to live the way they did, but Renesmée was above all that. For someone near her to be affected by death, the most human thing of all, was incomprehensible, unacceptable.

In this, as with many other matters, Carlisle was glad Renesmée wasn’t frozen quite the way vampires were. Her memories weren’t as sharp and her brain was wired more like humans. In time, her grief over Charlie would fade.

And hopefully, she’d understand humanity a little better.

But he’d rather not get into all that with Jane.

Especially since he had his doubts Renesmée was even at that grave, considering how Alice appeared to have missed the funny hats vision. Most likely, she’d changed her mind and gone to hunt with the others instead.

He didn’t want to get into that either.

«She’s camping,» he replied. And she was. Somewhere, Carlisle did not know where.

Jane hummed. «Can she eat human food?» She asked.

Carlisle smiled slightly. «We can all eat human food,» he pointed out, and Jane gave him a disgusted look. «But yes, Renesmée absorbs nutrients from human food. The flavor is dulled for her, though… not unlike how animal blood is for us,» he mused.

Jane furrowed her brow. «Weird,» she commented, and was silent for a few seconds. Then she looked up at him. «What was the wolf’s blood like?»

Carlisle gave her a surprised look.

He hadn’t expected Jane to be full of so many questions.

But he supposed Jane had to have a lot of questions about him, and not just about the supposed gift. Most vampires did, and Jane had been hearing about him from Aro. Anyone would be curious.

Strangely, for all that she had no relation to Aro, she was starting to remind Carlisle of him. 

Her smile had that same brightness, her questions that same inoffensive curiosity for all they were invasive.

The Volturi were not a family in the way that Carlisle’s coven was. They had strong relationships and cared for one another, yet while Aro was the closest thing Jane had to a father, he was her leader before anything else. A Volturi guard member was not a Volturi coven member, and the difference in rank was one of the many ways in which the Volturi remained archaic.

All the same, it was impossible to live with someone for centuries and not develop strong, personal bonds. And from what Carlisle had seen and heard of Jane, Aro’s paternal devotion to her was one of the things most important to her in this world.

He wondered what her parents had been like.

His own Rosalie was frozen on the cusp of adulthood. Though she was an adult in most of the ways that counted, when she had found her place within the family she had chosen to be his daughter, not his sister. Ostensibly, this had been because she found his true age daunting and felt he was more the father than the brother type, but as the years went by and her smile shone just as brightly each time Carlisle supported and complimented her achievements, it had become painfully clear that he was standing in for the father she wished she had had in life.

He had met Mr. Hale on a few occasions and the man had been nothing but affectionate to his beautiful daughter. However, the more Carlisle would later get to know Rosalie, the clearer it became that her parents had put too much stock in her looks and too little in Rosalie herself.

While Carlisle wouldn’t place all the blame upon her parents, there was no denying that Rosalie had been taught what her value was. She was eternally in a state of mind where she valued her beauty more than any of her other attributes, while also striving to be good at everything else so that she would be more than her looks.

And just as he was powerless in the face of Renesmée’s grief over Charlie, with Rosalie there was nothing Carlisle could do but cherish her, and hope that she would one day learn to cherish herself for her own sake.

Something indeterminable about Jane reminded Carlisle of this part of Rosalie. She certainly seemed to have allowed Aro to usurp her heart a bit too easily for someone who had had an uncomplicated relationship with her human parents.

More pressingly, Carlisle was starting to suspect her questions would keep him busy until Aro got back, even if it took hours.

«It smelled just like human blood,» he answered, «though I can’t say for sure if the flavor was the same, for obvious reasons.» He winked down at her.

She shook her head at him. «We’ll happily spare a few wolf carcasses for your family, if you want. They’ll be very upset with you if you had a feast and didn’t share, I’m sure,» she said.

He smiled, and they walked in amiable silence for a few minutes.

He now regretted having never gotten the chance to know Jane before this. Her charm was undeniable, her smile contagious. 

Yes, if Carlisle got the chance after this awful weekend was over, then he would quite like to get to know Jane better.

Of course, there was still the matter of Bree’s death.

However, while Jane might not have been an immortal child, her brain was frozen at a stage where empathy required more effort than it did adults. More, she had spent over a thousand years executing criminals, by now Carlisle imagined the life of your average John Doe vampire meant nothing to her.

It was becoming clear why Aro had wanted them to spend time together.

The Jane who had rashly executed Bree Tanner, and the Jane who was speaking to him now, were such different people that Carlisle could understand why Aro would trust a child to be in charge of a mission in the first place.

Jane was just mature enough to be trusted, yet too immature to realize the full scope her actions could have.

Her behavior now only proved it. She was off duty so to say, and so she relaxed and smiled, as carelessly as any child.

He didn’t know her well, yet Carlisle was starting to suspect that Jane lived in a strong «us» vs. «them» kind of world. 

And despite their history, through his friendship with Aro, Carlisle appeared to have become accepted as an «us».

So no, if anybody, Carlisle blamed Caius for Bree’s death.

Caius had given Jane the implicit order to punish the Cullens, one way or another, and she had carried it out. More, Caius would have made it quite clear to her that he approved of her actions.

If Aro had no intention of reconciling himself with Carlisle’s family, that would only be fair, since Carlisle had no intention of reconciling himself with Caius.

«Back to the gift,» Jane mused aloud, «I’m guessing it isn’t perfect control,» she said, drawing out the last syllable in «control» and straightening her beret as she pondered.

«Are you the plague?» She asked.

Carlisle blinked and stopped walking. «Am I-  _ what?! _ »

She stopped walking too, and turned to stare triumphantly back at him. This was the look of a girl who thought that by jove, she had it. «You were a cleric in life, right? Aro said. And Christians thought we spread death and disease for the longest time, so you must have thought as much as well. So, you become a demonic underling, and Aro has this theory that gifts can be influenced, so maybe that prejudice made your gift the plague. And now you’re a doctor because the humans around you keep falling ill!» she finished proudly. 

She looked at him expectantly, as if any moment now he would grin, tell her «Spot on, Jane!», and give her a baby to eat.

«No?» She asked after several seconds of Carlisle gaping wordlessly at her.

«No!» Carlisle protested, loudly enough that several humans looked at him. «I’m not the plague!» He whispered loudly at her.

He spared a moment to wish his weekend hadn’t gotten so off-track that he was now reduced to trying to convince a dubious-looking Jane that he wasn’t one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

To think a mere twenty-four hours ago, he was waving his family goodbye as he left to spend a normal weekend doing normal things.

«Aro thinks my gift is charming and persuading people,» he finally explained to Jane.

«That was my next guess,» she countered without missing a beat, before her eyes widened as she took in what he’d revealed. «Really?»

Carlisle sighed, and threw his hands out in the air. «Debatably. I don’t think it is, but if it is, then it’s a gift that’s impossible to prove.»

Jane frowned. «Heidi was difficult but not impossible to prove. She just thought she was pretty,» she said.

Carlisle shook his head. «Aro’s theory is that I’m…»  _ a lamp _ , his mind supplied unhelpfully as he searched for the right term, «irresistible. That people can’t help liking me, and they’re easily persuaded by me. That it’s why I can live with humans.» He shook his head again.

Jane’s eyes went very wide.

«I think he’s wrong, in part because the vampire population would have switched to animal blood ages ago if I had such a gift,» Carlisle continued, before adding, «Aro would have been first.»

Jane’s eyes were still quite wide. «I can’t help liking you.» 

She stopped walking and frowned up at him. «I’ve spent the past decade thinking you were the worst thing to happen to the vampire world, and now, after five minutes in your company I like you better than most of the people in the guard.»

Carlisle stared at her for a second before he gave a quick, humorless laugh. «Well, I’m glad you don’t think I’m the scourge of vampire kind anymore, Jane, that’s nice.»

«Hey, I didn’t mean-» she began, but Carlisle cut her off.

«Jane, you just admitted to having had a strawman version of me. It’s really no wonder, and not a sign of any gifts, that being around me in a civil setting where we make small talk would change your perspective.

If so then you must have a gift as well, because I’ll admit that I haven’t had a particularly high opinion of you either. Yet in the past few minutes, I’ve found that you’re a very charming and agreeable young woman.»

«Really?» She smiled, her bloodless cheeks round like apples. She looked so wonderfully sweet that Carlisle found himself wondering, just as Aro had, how humans could ever find her frightening.

«Yes, really, Jane. We both think the other person here is great. If anything, we’re proving that Aro fell victim to confirmation bias.»

Jane stared up at him for a moment, deep in thought. «No,» she finally concluded.

Carlisle threw his hands in the air. «Jane-» he began, but she shook her head.

«No,» she continued, «this isn’t normal. I don’t just  _ get along _ with people.» She gave a sardonic grin. «It took Demetri five years of cracking jokes about the Romanians before I gave him the time of day. And the jokes were funny, I just didn’t like his hair.»

«You didn’t like Demetri because of his hair?» Carlisle echoed in surprise.

Demetri’s hairstyle was perhaps a bit dated, but Carlisle had always thought he pulled it off. Better than most people would, in any case.

More, that was an incredibly petty reason not to like a person.

Jane, meanwhile, was looking quite morose. «I said that flippantly, but… I don't get along with people.» She crossed her arms in front of her, hugging herself, and looked up at him. «You just said it yourself. I have a reputation. And even if I didn’t, I’m a child.» A bitter smile crossed her lips. «It doesn’t matter how old I get, I’m still a child.»

She didn’t have to explain.

In a guard filled with dozens of vampires, there were always going to be plenty of vampires that new and old members could form relationships with.

It was a common belief among vampires that a person’s gift was an expression of their true self, one way or another. And this theory seemed to be correct in enough cases that when it came to a gift such as Jane’s…

Well, she had a reputation.

Even if it hadn’t been for the gift, she still would have been a child, and vampires did not have the reasons humans did to socialize with children. To them, an immortal child was something to fawn over and adore, or to pity. Maybe even euthanize.

It was not someone to form a friendship with.

Jane looked up at him with such sadness that he felt his heart breaking. «I do have many who are dear to me, but…» she gave a small shrug. «I suppose you have a point, maybe it is easy to win me over.»

Carlisle stared at her sorrowfully.

More and more, as he came to know the immortals around him, it made him wonder if there was a vampire in the world who wasn’t, on some level, unbearably lonely.

He had pitied Jane and Alec for their youth from the moment he learned of their existence, but he had hoped that their very immaturity was a mercy keeping them from fully understanding just how sad their lives were.

It seemed this was not the case.

He found himself wondering who Jane would have grown up to be, had she had the chance. If she was this introspective at such a young age, it seemed the answer would have been someone quite wonderful.

But life had not turned out that way for Jane. And she would have to live with that forever.

«I’m so sorry,» he said quietly, and he meant every syllable.

Jane waved a hand, and looked a bit embarrassed. «Yeah, let’s change the subject.»

Carlisle nodded, and opened his mouth to speak, when he heard her scoff lightly.

He looked down curiously.

«We’re going to have to add me pouring my heart out to you with no provocation to our list of evidence,» Jane said with a wry smile.

Carlisle gave her an unimpressed look. «Really?» He asked.

And he did actually half expect her to laugh and say no.

But she didn’t.

Instead, Jane looked utterly lost in thought.

Slowly, not wanting to attract attention from the humans around them, Carlisle started walking again. Jane followed, still silent.

Finally, she said, «No gift is impossible to prove.»

She looked sharply up at him. «A gift is something one vampire can do that others can’t. There must be a test we can perform. We remove external variables, do the test, and see if we can replicate it. The question is what it’s going to be,» she mused. «If we can’t come up with such a test, you don’t have a gift.»

She looked up at him, and was quite put out when she saw Carlisle grinning at her.

«Has Aro been teaching you about the scientific method?» He asked.

She relaxed and smiled slightly. «A little,» she admitted.

Carlisle laughed.

«Alright, so an experiment,» he said. «I could persuade you to try the animal diet?» he offered, and grinned when Jane burst into laughter.

«Oh, it’s you,» A voice sounded. Carlisle looked up to see Dr. Mehdi standing in front of him, looking surprised and uncomfortable.

As he should, given that as far as he knew, Carlisle had murdered his lifelong friend and colleague the night before. And in a singularly brutal way at that.

How had Carlisle missed his approach?

Jane looked up at Carlisle questioningly. «It’s one of my human colleagues,» Carlisle whispered to her too quietly for humans to hear, «act human.»

«I have an idea,» Jane whispered back, and before Carlisle could stop her she’d stepped in front of him to greet Dr. Mehdi.

Oh, no.

«Hi!» she said brightly, flashing a mouth full of teeth.

Dr. Mehdi paled and took an instinctual step back.

«H-hi,» he stuttered, his heart suddenly racing. He had that look on his face that all humans got when a vampire approached them. 

The look that they knew they were in danger, they didn’t know why and it didn’t make any sense to them that they should feel that way, but they couldn’t shake the feeling either.

It was, Carlisle would admit, not a look they ever had around him.

«Jane, what are you doing?» he whispered so Dr. Mehdi couldn’t hear.

«You said Aro thinks your gift is why the humans like you, so I’m trying to charm the human,» she whispered back.

Dr. Mehdi shot Carlisle a panicked look. «Cullen, you know this girl?» He asked.

Carlisle smiled as reassuringly as he could, and stepped up next to Jane. He put a hand on her shoulder so she wouldn’t approach Dr. Mehdi any further.

«Sort of,»» he said, «I mean, yes.» He corrected after receiving a look from Jane. He pulled her slightly closer, hoping it’d make her appear less threatening.

Dr. Mehdi nodded, relaxing slightly. His heartbeat slowed.

«Now that’s interesting,» Jane murmured so Dr. Mehdi couldn’t hear. «Alright, you try to intimidate him, I’ll try to calm him down,» she whispered quickly.

Carlisle realized with horror that no one had told Jane that there was a federal investigation going on, one in which Carlisle starred as the prime suspect. Carlisle could absolutely not afford to walk around intimidating anybody. 

He couldn’t start explaining to Jane either, she would break her human girl cover in an instant and he couldn’t get into an argument with her in front of Dr. Mehdi.

Not to mention, judging by the look Dr. Mehdi was giving him, the man was plenty intimidated already.

«Let’s not do that, Jane,» he whispered. «We can prove the gift with someone else, just not him,» he continued quickly.

Jane frowned, but gave a small nod.

Dr. Gibbons appeared from a door just behind Dr. Mehdi.

Carlisle concentrated for a moment, and sure enough, he could pick out the heartbeats and voices of not just Drs. Gibbons and Mehdi, but all his colleagues. They were inside a coffee shop three buildings down.

He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised his colleagues had stuck together after he left them at the police station. They couldn’t very well go enjoy the resort either after what had happened, and that really only left sitting around to mourn together.

None of them had texted Carlisle.

There was no doubt.

They thought he was the murderer.

Carlisle cringed internally. «Jane, be human, it’s extremely important,» he whispered to her, and she frowned again, but seemed to take his words to heart.

Dr. Gibbons came up next to Dr. Mehdi. «Cullen,» he said, giving Carlisle a one-over with narrow eyes. «You ran off,» he accused.

He then spotted Jane, and took a full step back. «Um,» he said, giving her an alarmed look.

As well he should.

Jane was lovely, but her features were too perfect to truly be childlike, too fey to be human. Her limbs held too much agility and strength, and her posture was too still. Her large sunglasses and bold fashion statement weren’t helping her look normal either.

Dr. Gibbons’ eyes snapped back up to look at Carlisle, and he looked utterly confused. «Who is this kid, your niece?»

«No!» Carlisle exclaimed.

Dr. Gibbons looked from Carlisle’s hand on her shoulder, to Jane’s porcelain-like and far too perfect features, to Carlisle’s own porcelain-like and far too perfect features. All vampires looked on some level similar, venom had a very distinct effect on human tissue, yet Carlisle realized with a heavy feeling that Jane looked more like him than Jasper looked like Rosalie. They both had androgynous, delicate, North European features, full lips, and similar face shapes.

Dr. Gibbons’ frown grew deeper, he looked dubious.

Next to Carlisle, Jane’s eyes lit up dangerously, and he knew in the moment before she opened her mouth, what she was about to say.

«Don’t,» he whispered quickly, feeling not unlike an animal staring down the barrel of a gun just as the hunter squeezed the trigger.

But there was no stopping Jane.

She schooled her features into a look of utter hurt and betrayal, and stared accusingly up at Carlisle. «Why do you  _ always _ say that when we’re in public?» She yelled at him, her eyes welling up with venom.

She spun towards Drs. Mehdi and Gibbons, who were staring slack-jawed at her. «I’m his  _ daughter _ ,» she said with a thick voice. «Fath-Dad gave up custody since his wife didn’t like me,» she continued, basking in the look of utter shock on both humans. «And then he adopts a bunch of other kids, like I’m nothing. I never see him anymore!» she continued, her voice cracking artfully at the end.

As he noted her remarkable acting skill, Carlisle dully remembered Aro telling him how in slower periods, the Volturi guard liked to put on theatre productions to entertain their leaders and each other.

Then she covered her face with her hands so Drs. Gibbons and Mehdi wouldn’t see her grinning, turned, and ran in the opposite direction.

Carlisle was left with two shell-shocked humans.

«Oh my god, Cullen,» Dr. Gibbons whispered.

Dr. Mehdi stepped slowly backwards, a look on his face like he didn’t even know who Carlisle was anymore. Carlisle might as well have told him why his eyes were red.

«I-» Carlisle began, but no explanation came to mind.

About a block away, Jane was giggling helplessly.

Carlisle closed his eyes in shame. «I have to go,» he whispered.

One look into the reflection in a passing human’s eyes told him that the two doctors were standing exactly where Carlisle left them.

Carlisle horror grew as he did the math, as they inevitably would once they recovered from their initial shock.

Carlisle was pretending to be twenty-seven. Jane looked around twelve, maybe a bit older given her Trinity cosplay.

Carlisle Cullen would have been fifteen, at most, when he had her. Most likely fourteen.

The family’s cover story this time around had been that he was from the foster system, and had decided to give back the second he was financially able. Esme had been aged up slightly, putting her at thirty-one, and her money put him through medical school. Maybe it made Carlisle look like a gold digger, but they needed to explain how someone as young as him wound up with not five, but seven foster kids.

Carlisle realized with horror that now that a critical eye would turn towards their family, Esme would look like a pimp.

In earlier decades, when society was more patriarchal, people thought nothing of Carlisle keeping his wife out of the way.

Now, however...

Esme marries a beautiful young man straight out of the foster system, in exchange young Carlisle gets an education. Then she adopts a series of the most beautiful people she can find. All of them teenagers, just the right age where they’re not too young, not too old.

No one ever sees her, no one is ever invited to the house they all live in, and Carlisle goes alone to all PTA meetings...

Oh, god.

Of all the backstories his family had ever had to explain themselves, this one was by far the darkest.

Technically it had been Bella who came up with it, as she had been eager to mastermind a foolproof backstory. But they had all approved. 

Truthfully, it was nice that someone in the family had shown some zeal for a credible backstory. Carlisle himself had given up on being normal when Alice and Jasper showed up. So, when he had to cover for seven people, his top priority had just been to not let people think they were a cult.

He could never tell Esme, Carlisle realized. She’d die on the spot, vampire invulnerability be damned. God, he hoped she never found out.

Carlisle himself was currently dying on the inside, if anything he was surprised he hadn’t turned into a pile of ashes right there on the sidewalk.

And fathering Jane at a depressingly young age fit perfectly with this awful backstory.

Troubled fourteen-year-old teenage father Carlisle had dropped his daughter like yesterday’s news as soon as he had a rich wife. Or some other, dreadful story, like Jane being conceived through statutory rape or teenage Carlisle being declared an unfit father.

At least if he was meeting his bastard daughter, Carlisle now had a reason to be in Whitefish that wasn’t having woken up one day wanting to maul his coworkers. It was a terrible reason, though, and Aro would probably scream.

The doctors would tell the feds, Carlisle was sure, and they in turn would make the most of this.

And they would find no record of Carlisle Cullen having any daughters, making it all even more of a mess.

Carlisle bitterly cursed the fact that he couldn’t reach Jasper. He needed fake papers for Jane, now.

«Jane,» Carlisle hissed when he passed her table.

Jane was sitting completely frozen, holding a napkin to her face to hide her expression as she tried desperately not to start screaming with laughter for all of Whitefish to hear.

More gracefully than any cat, she rose from her chair and jumped the fence to land next to Carlisle.

They walked in silence for several minutes, as Carlisle led them out of the town, into nature where there would be no humans, and Jane tried to keep her composure.

They made their way into the trees, and in the next instant they were several hundred yards away from any humans.

At which point Jane crumpled to the forest floor, and gave herself over to hysterical laughter.

«Jane,» Carlisle sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose.

Jane kept laughing.

Carlisle’s phone buzzed. 

It was a call from agent Westley.

He ignored it.

And Jane kept laughing.

«Admit that was funny,» she eventually said.

«It wasn’t funny,» Carlisle replied. «Although it did prove I don’t have a gift.»

Jane sobered and straightened up. «No, it doesn’t.»

«Did you see how they looked at me?» Carlisle demanded, throwing his hands out before him. «They clearly don’t think I’m wonderful!»

«Did you see the way they looked at  _ me _ ?» Jane parried. «They were both terrified of me, all humans are. But they acted so  _ normal _ around you, Carlisle. Sure, they were a little uncomfortable, but they weren’t scared the way they should be. I agree with Aro, there’s something there,» she stated confidently.

Carlisle shook his head. «They’ve known me for two years, I see them nearly every day.»

«Then let’s find a human you don’t know.»

«Jane-» Carlisle began, but she held up a finger, her eyes glowing with another bright idea she’d just had.

«And you’re not going to just calm them down, because you’ve been a doctor for centuries. If there’s some trick to making humans feel at ease, then you’ve mastered it by now.»

Carlisle frowned, he had never had to worry about making humans feel at ease. But he didn’t tell her that.

Jane continued her reasoning. «Aro said you’re persuasive. Did he specify how?»

Carlisle’s eyes narrowed. «Jane, where are you headed with this?»

She grinned.

Carlisle sighed. «Aro thinks I get people to… hear me out. When they otherwise wouldn’t,» he explained to her.

Jane’s grin widened. «Then you’re going to approach a human who doesn’t know you, and get them to do something bizarre. Not unreasonable, just something weird that they wouldn’t normally do. And then if you succeed I’ll find a different human and try the same thing, I’ll copy exactly what you did,» she concluded happily.

Carlisle stared at her.

«I’m under a federal investigation,» he said.

Jane blinked. «I’m sorry?» she asked, as if he’d spoken in a foreign language.

«The human who was killed and the Child of the Moon. The humans found both bodies, and they’ve zeroed in on me in this investigation. A federal agent wants to interrogate me,» he explained.

«It’s why Aro left, he’s looking for the best way out of this mess,» Carlisle continued.

Jane got a look of dawning, terrible, realization on her face. «When I drew attention to you in front of those humans…»

Carlisle’s lips twisted into a wry smirk. «That was poorly timed. Although you didn’t make me look that much worse than I already do, so…» he trailed off, and laughed humorlessly to himself while Jane sat there in mortified horror.

Best not to tell her precisely how much worse she had made his backstory.

«The one time I talk to humans I’m not hunting…» she whispered to herself.

Carlisle shrugged. «At least you made me look less perfect,» he said flippantly. «According to Alice, that’s been a problem,» he told her.

_ Not anymore _ , he thought to himself, and laughed aloud again, perhaps a bit neurotically.

From wholesome all-American family man to axe murdering prostitute with errant bastards possibly born of statutory rape running around, all in less than twenty-four hours. 

Let it never be said that Carlisle had not taken Alice at her word when she asked him to be less perfect.

Jane’s lips twisted, still chewing on the federal investigation. «Do you think you could ask Aro not to tell Caius about this?» She asked.

Carlisle burst out laughing again, as loudly as Jane had laughed this time. 

Jane gave him a panicked look, to her this was far from a humorous matter. Carlisle covered his mouth with his hand, and composed himself. «I’m going to let Aro explain this one,» he chuckled.

He’d have to make sure he was in the room when Jane approached Aro. He couldn’t miss this.

Jane still looked concerned.

Carlisle removed his hand to grin openly at her. «You won’t get into trouble, Jane, don’t worry about it,» he said.

Jane turned pensive. «You have that much power over Aro?» She asked.

Carlisle blinked. «No, that’s not why. And I don’t.»

Jane’s eyes narrowed, as something seemed to occur to her. 

«Aro  _ adores _ you.» She stated point blank.

She tilted her head in thought. «You walk into Volterra with no gift of your own, yet after one touch of your hand Aro lets you join the coven. You get free access to his library, you get, uh,» if she was human she would have blushed very brightly as she tried to find a non-embarrassing way of defining the explicit part of Aro and Carlisle’s relationship. She ended up making a vague hand gesture towards Carlisle, «you get  _ close, _ » she settled on, before continuing, «there’s paintings and murals of you everywhere. And then when you leave Aro talks about you nonstop for centuries!»

She was looking at him with new eyes. «I don’t think we need an experiment,» she said quietly.

«I didn’t join the coven, I was more of a guest…» Carlisle began, but trailed off.

Funny how there was no human food in his system, yet he felt like throwing up all the same.

Jane was still just staring at him, her eyes as wide as they had been when she learned he’d eaten the wolf’s heart. «You have a gift,» she whispered.

Carlisle stared at her for a near minute. 

A memory surfaced.

Just over half a century ago, he had been out driving with Rosalie. They’d been on a deserted road when they came upon a human family who’d been in a car accident.

Carlisle had jumped out of the car and gotten the humans out as quickly as he could, peeling the bent and broken metal of their ruined car away like wrapping paper.

There had been four of them, three adults and one toddler, no older than a year old. The child had been the only one not injured, but it was cold, and frightened. As Carlisle labored to save the adults, Rosalie had tried to pick up the child, wanting to comfort it.

Even in its confused and disoriented state, or perhaps because of it, the child had given an ear-splitting scream in terror when it saw her approaching. It had rolled around to crawl away as quickly as it could.

Rosalie had stepped back, looking so small and hurt. And the child did need to be comforted and kept warm. Carlisle had picked it up and strode over to place it in her arms, quickly so as not to lose any of the precious time he had with the injured adults. As he did, he had willed it to be calm, to recognize that Rosalie was not a threat.

The child had calmed instantly.

As Carlisle successfully saved the child’s parents and grandfather, Rosalie had sat inside her car with the child gurgling happily and tugging at her hair. The smile on her face shone brighter than the sun itself.

It had been a good memory, but now… 

Carlisle looked up at Jane.

«We’re doing the experiment.»

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutout to All_the_devils_are_here on Ao3 for pointing out the continuity error that I killed off Charlie only to have Renesmée visit grandpa Charlie. Hope I fixed it to everyone's satisfaction.
> 
> Also shoutout to The Carnivorous Muffin, beta galore.


	9. Chapter 9

«Pick  _ up _ , Alice,» Carlisle muttered into the phone as it rang.

It went to voicemail.

_ «This is Al-»  _

Carlisle ended the call, and glared down at his phone.

«No luck?» Jane asked.

He shook his head.

Part of him was grateful.

If Alice were to get involved now, he’d have to explain why his eyes were red, why he was with Jane, and why they had gone shopping together. 

Or more accurately, he would have to come up with an excuse for those last two things that did not involve a hypothetical gift that was, if not mind control, then the next best thing.

A gift that he had potentially been using on his unwitting family members for decades.

He would assume it wasn’t so until the opposite was proven, but if it was-

No. He would not walk down that path, not unless he had to. He would find out for sure, and take it from there.

However he could take such a thing.

He shook his head, for the third time in a minute, forcing the dread away like scrubbing blood stains from white linen.

If it were true, it would not be something he could just drop on his family over the phone. They wouldn’t believe it, anyway.

But given the mess he was in now with the murder investigation and unwanted bastard daughter, he needed Alice’s help. She really ought to pick that phone up.

Still. Gifts aside, he was glad Alice evidently wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing. He’d prefer if she didn’t see what he and Jane were about to do.

The strategy they had landed on was to look and act strange. Not insane, but strange enough that a human would not be able to get past it in regular conversation. If they made it past that initial test then they would suggest the human do something. Again, not anything insane, just something the human would never do under normal circumstances.

It had taken some back and forth, a back and forth mostly consisting of Jane throwing out outrageous ideas that Carlisle shot down in utter embarrassment, but they had eventually landed on something.

They were going to dress up as priests and convince the chosen human that their priestmobile had broken down after they poured holy water into the tank. Now they needed money for a cab so they could get to a church and get the Blood of Christ, before driving to Jerusalem. They would insist that the Blood of Christ in the tank would fix their car, and that it was feasible to drive from Whitefish, Montana, to Jerusalem, Israel.

(Carlisle had originally wanted to do something that wasn’t making fun of people’s faith, but Jane had been very right that modern human cults were just the right brand of ridiculous. And he truly had been unable to come up with anything better.

Jane had also wanted them to talk outdated English while they were at it, thee-ing and thou-ing as ridiculously as they could make it, but Carlisle had to put his foot down somewhere.)

It would be utterly insane, but, Jane reasoned, no more insane than a vampire doctor. If Carlisle could make people think he was a thirty-five-year-old surgeon with adult children, then he could make them believe he could drive a car across the Atlantic.

So now they were walking slowly past the clothing stores, Jane peering through every window with a little frown on her face as she searched for the appropriate vestments.

She frowned unhappily.

«Finding anything?» Carlisle asked.

«No…» she pouted.

There was a costume store nearby, but Carlisle would not insult Jane’s fashion sense by insinuating they dress up as cheap Halloween features. Besides, store bought children’s costumes were never any good.

They entered the mall.

Carlisle looked at the dining area.

It was half full, with people talking leisurely, the harvest of their shopping venture clustered around them.

He gave Jane a pat on the shoulder, and beelined towards the dining area.

He went straight to a senior couple who were in the middle of eating.

«Hi!» He said, sitting down beside them.

They looked up at him, and had the usual reaction of utter astonishment as they beheld his beauty. 

It was a few seconds before the woman cleared her throat to speak. «Hi…» she muttered quietly.

Carlisle smiled, and pointed to her drink. «Could I have that?» He asked.

The woman looked very surprised by his request, but she acquiesced. She picked the paper cup up, and handed it to him, looking somewhat expectant.

He smiled in gratitude, got up, and in full view of the couple dumped the cup in the trash.

He heard Jane snort.

The couple’s heartbeat stayed even, neither of them appearing to object to Carlislse throwing their food away.

Carlisle stared at them for a moment. They were a very ordinary pair, locals by the look of their grocery bags. Sweet, unassuming, and gray, they were the kind of couple that could be found in every town, and every time period.

He’d met thousands of humans like them.

And they had all adored him.

He went back to them, sliding back into the booth next to the woman. They both looked bewildered, as most humans did when Carlisle approached them. Of course, usually he had reason to speak to humans, be it in the capacity of his work or something more casual.

He’d approached humans for bizarre reasons in the past as well, he remembered with a sickening feeling.

He’d shown up at stranger’s doorsteps with wounded humans he’d found on a hunt in his arms and been let in to perform surgery on a kitchen table without further ado, he’d talked colleagues he barely knew into trying medical procedures they hadn’t even heard of, and he’d made ludicrous excuses for his children’s misadventures in high school that the teachers somehow ended up believing.

And the humans always had this bewildered, yet expectant look on their faces, like they didn’t know why Carlisle was doing what he was doing but whatever he would ask them to do next, they had already agreed to do it.

Carlisle didn’t say anything, he just stared pointedly at the man’s drink for several seconds.

The man stared back.

Four seconds passed, and Carlisle started to relax. Perhaps he had let his imagination run away with him. The man would ask him to leave any second, he would do the experiment with Jane to be sure, and they would report to Aro that he had been mistaken.

But then the man wordlessly pushed his cup towards Carlisle.

Carlisle couldn’t have described how he felt, truth be told he didn’t feel anything at all just yet, but he had the strangest flash of a songbird being toppled off of its perch.

No, more like he hadn’t known he was on a perch at all, he’d thought he was on solid ground. And now, not only was the ground beneath him only a thin stick he had been clinging to desperately, but he was in freefall.

And below him was only horror, inescapable, stretching out indefinitely.

«Thanks,» he said after a beat, and got up quickly to dump this cup in the trash as well.

The couple didn’t seem to mind that either.

He fished out several bills from his wallet in quick, automatic movements and gave them to the wide-eyed couple.

«Do you want my plate-» the woman started, but Carlisle had already turned his back on them and was walking quickly back to Jane, almost breaking into a jog.

She was shaking with silent laughter. «I can’t believe I thought you’d be a bore,» she giggled.

Jane, it seemed, was having a delightful time watching Carlisle do this.

That made one of them.

He wondered if this was because she didn’t understand the full implications of Carlisle’s gift, if she did understand it but found it entertaining anyway, or if it was both, that she did understand it, but her youth made it hard for her to fully appreciate just how nightmarish this was.

Or perhaps she had been right earlier about being influenced, and Carlisle’s gift was making it impossible for her to see what was happening.

«It could just be they were simply surprised,» he said. «Compliance is often the easiest way to react.»

Yes. Isolated, this one incident could mean nothing.

Jane raised an eyebrow. «Want to see me try?»

Carlisle shrugged. «You don’t have to.»

But Jane looked like she wanted to do it, regardless of how necessary it was.

She nodded, a smile on her lips as she looked for a suitable target.

She was clearly enjoying herself.

Having found a suitable human, she walked straight towards a woman sitting on a bench in front of a store, enjoying a book.

«Hello,» Jane said softly, and though she had her back turned to Carlisle, he could see from her reflection in the store window that she was smiling as sweetly as she possibly could.

She could not have looked less human if she tried.

Of course, her outdated, 90’s Matrix cosplay wasn’t helping.

The woman shrank back. «Oh…» she said, and threw a look to her side, searching for an exit.

Then, gathering courage, she looked back at Jane. «Are you… are you lost?» She asked, though it was clear she was hoping this wouldn’t be the case at all and she wouldn’t be obligated to help this terrifying child.

Jane shook her head.

«I was wondering if I could look at your book for a second,» she said.

The woman swallowed, and shrank back even further. «I…» she wet her lips.

Then, quickly, she all but stabbed the book at Jane, holding it out away from her body, her other arm rising to cover her torso defensively.

Jane accepted with a curtsey, but the woman got up before Jane could do anything else.

«I, uh,» the woman said, stepping away from Jane even as she spoke, «I left… I left my cat at home,» she said, and spun on her heel away from Jane.

«Your book!» Jane called after her.

«Keep it!» The woman yelled back as she broke into a very brisk walk.

Jane scribbled something into the book’s first page, slipped it into an unaware passing woman’s bag, and walked back to Carlisle. «I’ll admit that was worse than usual,» she said.

Carlisle pursed his lips, not about to ask what she’d written. «Yes, that was…»

Feeling oddly rushed, he strode over to a middle-aged woman who was hurrying along towards the exit, and cut her off. She was short, stout, and frowning harshly at nothing in particular.

This was not a woman who would humor Carlisle’s babble.

«Could I have that?» He asked without any preamble, pointing to one of her grocery bags.

She frowned at him. «Excuse me?» She demanded, quite put out by his request. She looked at him again, and he saw the double take as she took in his face.

He gave her his most wonderful smile, and leaned in closer. «It’s for science,» he told her.

Her frown deepened. «Well, I don’t really believe in science, but…» she glared at him suspiciously for another moment. He batted his eyelashes at her, still smiling. She harrumphed, before nodding to herself. «Fair enough,» she mumbled, and started looking through her bags to see which one she could do without.

«Nevermind, I don’t believe in science either,» Carlisle said quickly, and returned to Jane before the woman could actually give him any of her food.

In several of the countless reflective surfaces littering, Carlisle could see from multiple angles the reflection of the woman straighten again, and resume her hurry towards the exit, shaking her head slightly as she was released from whatever influence Carlisle had held over her.

Jane was staring at him. «I really shouldn’t like you as much as I do, should I,» she said quietly, her eyes wide. «I mean, I figured, but… this is...»

She looked deeply discomforted.

Carlisle wondered if she was becoming aware of what his gift meant now, or if his gift truly worked as Aro had said it did.

If it did, everyone would think the best of Carlisle, always.

And that meant that even if they became aware of his gift, they wouldn’t be able to truly appreciate its devastating ramifications.

He tried to find comfort in the fact that Jane was quite horrified after seeing his interactions with the humans.

He was too.

Humans had never feared him, but he hadn’t thought about that. It had simply been the way it was for him. Humans liked Carlisle.

Everyone did.

Edward would fondly remark, with admiration and love glowing in his eyes, that Carlisle was that unique brand of good where humans could just sense his goodness, and so know they had nothing to fear. Carlisle would laugh at his flattery, but ultimately think nothing further of it. He’d figured something along those same lines, anyway, that something about his demeanor and body language put the humans at ease. He’d assumed his children would get there eventually as well, as they got better at controlling their thirst.

But the humans feared Rosalie and Edward as much as they did Esme.

Blending in had become easier once his children had Jasper accompanying them to new schools and colleges, Carlisle remembered dazedly. 

Because Jasper used his gift to take away the humans’ apprehension until they had grown accustomed to the Cullen kids.

And it wasn’t just the humans.

Jane liked Carlisle very much. Was it too much?

If he were to ask her to give him her beret, would she?

If he asked her to hurt someone for him, would she?

Most unwelcome, but unyielding, came the memory of watching «The Truman Show» with Edward. Edward had criticized Jim Carrey relentlessly, of course. But as they were watching Harry Truman walk around in the town square, doing whatever he pleased and watching the world mold itself around him, Edward had actually paid attention for a few minutes.

This, Carlisle realized, as the memory of that day came back, was what Harry Truman had felt like when he found out his life, his whole reality, was fiction. 

The rules didn’t apply anymore.

If all the world had no choice but to love Carlisle… 

«Let’s find our costumes,» he told Jane in a quiet voice.

She nodded, and marched towards the first clothing store.

Several stores and several instances of Jane terrifying various shopkeepers later, and they had found nothing that satisfied Jane. Not even as she lowered her standards to «let’s just be monks, or something».

«There was that coat, but it was more mafia than clergyman,» Jane mused aloud as they sat down at a café table outside the mall, having gone through far too many stores.

Carlisle felt quite indifferent. «Then let’s be mafia,» he said dully. 

«Catholic mafia, and then we won’t have to change the story,» he added, trying to make himself feel invested for her sake.

His mind felt like a panicked deer, running in circles desperate to avoid thinking about the terrifying thing that he very much had to think about.

He wanted nothing more than to forget all about this, for Aro to never have opened his mouth, for all of this weekend to go away so his life could go back to normal-

Well, there wasn’t going to be a normal after this, was there?

Even if it all turned out to be a grand misunderstanding and he had no gift, the investigation over his head still meant that his days of being Dr. Carlisle Cullen, an unnoticed hospital wallflower, were numbered.

« _ You’ll have fun in Whitefish, _ » Alice had said.

Jane shook her head no, a contemplative frown on her face. «Are there any churches nearby?» She asked.

Carlisle rose from his contemplations enough to give her a narrow-eyed stare. «I may be fine with poking a bit of fun at Christian cults, but we are not robbing a church, Jane.»

Jane made a frustrated noise, which in her childlike, yet vampiric voice came out as the clear, yet sweet chime of a xylophone key. A particularly angelic xylophone at that.

He tilted his head, considering her perfect, cherubic features and small frame. Even for a child, she was delicately built. She should not have been threatening to anyone, and yet humans seemed to find her more intimidating than they did most vampires. The only person in Carlisle’s family who got anything close to the reaction from humans that Jane did was Emmet. He suspected it was her age. No one was meant to look the way vampires did, but children even less so. She looked even less human than the average vampire did.

Carlisle suspected that something else kicked in, too.

Humans were mammals, and mammals were hardwired to protect their young. This extended across species, making mother cats care for puppies and humans care for anything at all that was small and cute. The instinct to love and cherish anything cute and helpless was an evolutionary necessity, and had to run deeper than anything if a species wanted to survive.

Enter Jane, who was one of the smallest, cutest things Carlisle had ever seen, but from a species humans instinctively knew to fear. Maybe the very fact that she was something that humans knew they should care for made their fear exponential, made it impossible to deny that something was very wrong about her.

Carlisle would have to ask Aro if the humans were just as frightened of Alec.

A human waitress came up to them, cutting off Carlisle’s train of thought. «May I take your order?» She chirped brightly, her pupils large and her smile glowing as she took in Carlisle’s face.

Behind her, two of her colleagues were glaring, and not particularly subtly. «We need a better system for who gets to serve the hotties,» one muttered to the other, who nodded empathetically.

Carlisle smiled automatically back. «Coffee and a croissant, if you please. Jane?» He asked.

The waitress, as if only just noticing Jane, turned to take her order. Her reaction was as instantaneous as the woman with the book had been. The smile disappeared off her face, and she stepped back. «Uh-» she began, bewildered.

Jane smiled sweetly back, and didn’t say anything.

The waitress swallowed thickly.

Carlisle acted on instinct, as he always did when he was with his family in public, and laughed as charmingly as he could. «You’ll have to order something, Jane,» he told her kindly. He looked back up at the waitress and smiled brightly.

The waitress relaxed. She straightened, and smiled at Jane. «Your order, please?» She asked.

«Impressive,» Jane whispered so no human could hear. «Coffee and croissant, please,» she added aloud for the waitress, playing it safe by quoting Carlisle and testing the words on her tongue as she said them. Carlisle doubted Jane had any idea what humans served in their cafés. Or that she had any idea what coffee and croissant even was, for that matter. 

Still, she’d kept her English remarkably up to date, even accounting for demographics. Her vernacular was a perfect imitation of a twelve-year-old American girl. He suspected she consumed pop culture, as she wouldn’t have picked this up from associating with humans. Or maybe Aro made the Volturi take classes on modern vernacular. That would be a very Aro thing to do.

The waitress wrote down their orders, and disappeared again.

Jane was grinning at him.

Carlisle shook his head. «I do that all the time, that had nothing to do with…» he trailed off when realization hit him.

Jane’s grin widened. «You’re  _ definitely _ gifted,» she told him.

She was entirely too excited about this for someone who had only just found out she was being influenced to like someone who had very recently been someone she considered an enemy. Carlisle’s terrible suspicion that his gift made even those in the know unable to fully appreciate its ramifications grew.

He shook his head, again. «That wasn’t…» he began, but trailed off as no new arguments came to mind.

He did that all the time.

Bella’s time as a human came to mind.

One of the things that had made his family so endeared to her, apart from how she made Edward glow, had been how easily she accepted them. She never feared any of them, not even Jasper after he tried to kill her. Like the others, Carlisle had been amazed at her generosity, that she would be so understanding and feel so safe around a group of overpowered bloodsucking demons, and grateful to her for being so good for Edward.

But to his family she had been the only human they could interact with normally.

She laughed at Emmet’s jokes, she embraced Esme like it was the most natural thing in the world, she frowned when Jasper kept his distance, to say nothing of how she was with Alice and Edward.

Whatever evolutionary instinct told humans to fear vampires had passed over Bella.

And this had made no difference to Carlisle, because all the humans were like this around him. And they were like this around his family, too, if he introduced them.

Oh, god.

Jane hummed thoughtfully, heedless of Carlisle’s inner turmoil. «You didn’t notice because this has simply been how you’ve interacted with people for four hundred years. You’ve been living in a bubble where everyone is always friendly around you. How would you know?» She asked perkily.

With lightning speed, not caring about the human charade even as he was sitting right opposite a Volturi, Carlisle snapped out his wallet, fished out several more bills, and left them on the table. «We’re dropping the priest thing,» he told Jane curtly, and got up.

«We’re not just going to be unusual, we’re going to go all out. If there is a gift, then we find out how far it goes. And Jane, if you even agree to do this...» he said, putting his hands on the table and leaning towards her. 

She looked like she couldn’t decide whether to be excited or alarmed. 

«Jane, we’re going to get weird.» Carlisle told her.

* * *

«That’s a lot of colors,» Jane said, eyes wide as Carlisle joined her outside his hotel.

They’d parted ways, Jane would find the clothes while Carlisle would get the chalk paint.

Although judging by the Barnes & Noble bag dangling off her wrist, behind the dumpy, heavy bags flowing over with garishly colored clothes, it wasn’t the only thing she’d gotten.

She followed his gaze. «Pamphlets,» she explained. «Every madman has pamphlets. Although the lady was too scared to be very helpful, so I had to get Christmas cards instead,» she started shuffling her bags, completely unbothered by their weight, and eventually fished a card out of the Barnes & Noble.

She held it up for Carlisle to see.

It was bright, it was spattered in color. It said, «JOY TO THE WORLD» in big, friendly letters.

Not even Alice would have thought of that, Carlisle had to admit dazedly. «That’s perfect, Jane,» he told her after a moment’s pause, and she lit up.

«What’s your bounty?» She asked.

Carlisle put down his eight separate bags filled with different colors of paint, paint brushes, and paper and scissors for cutting out patterns for the paint, and showed her the colorful contents of his ninth bag.

Jane lit up.

«Wigs,» Carlisle told her with a wink.

Few people knew this about Carlisle, or about Jasper for that matter, but when the 70’s came and brought with them David Bowie, Elton John, and Queen, something about the glam rock aesthetic had found an instant place in both their hearts. Otherworldly, psychedelic, and humorous, and tailing over a century of dull, austere suits in men’s fashion, it had easily been one of Carlisle’s favorite human fashion trends. He’d even dared to hope it would become mainstream.

Enter the present day, and men’s fashion was more depressing than ever, with drab colors, ill-fitting seams, and plastic, plastic in everything. To humans it did not smell offensive, but to a vampire’s sensitive nose… 

Well, Carlisle supposed the plastic would still have been there if the seventies had won the fashion arms race, but still, he wished Ziggy Stardust had come out on top of this one.

As for Jasper, Jasper hadn’t seen enough of human fashion trends to see things the way Carlisle did, he just seemed to enjoy the esoteric strangeness of it.

Either way, they’d bonded over it, and been jointly miserable that the only time they could go all out without being bullied to death by the rest of the family was at costume parties. And even then they got bullied to death.

And now that Carlisle and Jane were going to become as strange as they possibly could, there really was no better sartorial option than this.

Carlisle had to say, he’d expected Jane to need some persuasion, which in turn would have let him see just how far his gift could persuade people. Instead, Jane had jumped on the idea, she hadn’t been entirely sure what glam rock actually was (he suspected she still wasn’t), but she apparently had a love for dress-up.

«This is going to be brilliant, Carlisle,» Jane grinned, and she meant every word of it.

Carlisle smiled back at her, and found himself oddly glad that he was doing this with Jane, of all people. 

She was genuinely having a good time, and more, she was intelligent enough to understand what the gift was without throwing him a pity party.

She was easy to be around, and that was very welcome in this hour.

Mostly, though, he was glad he wasn’t doing this alone.

They went up to his room, and Carlisle watched as Jane opened each of the paint cans, balancing them carefully on the small desk, and placing the paper and scissor on the chair.

«Alright,» she eventually said. «Do you have any particular look you want, or..?» She asked, studying the cans as if they would answer this question for her.

Carlisle had bought just about every color chalk paint the store had to offer, so he simply shrugged. «Up to you,» he told her.

Jane nodded seriously. «I’ll do my best,» she told him. «Now sit.»

Carlisle obeyed with a small smile, and sat very still for the next fifteen minutes as his face gradually became wetter. Every now and then he felt the ghost of paper pressed towards his skin, as Jane followed some sort of pattern.

Worryingly, Jane would emit little noises of «Oof…» and «Oh- oh no,» as she went, her thumb frequently coming up to rub away bits of paint.

Finally he heard her put the paint brush down. «Alright, I think we’re done,» she said musingly. «But don’t open your eyes just yet, that paint is definitely wet. Hold on-» she led him by the hand into the bath, and started blowing the hairdryer right into his face, at maximum velocity.

They stood like that for another ten minutes, Jane slowly moving that hairdryer around his face.

« _ Now _ we’re done,» she said, sounding satisfied.

«Have you made me beautiful?» Carlisle asked, and she snorted.

«See for yourself.»

Carlisle opened his eyes, and looked into the mirror.

Oh dear.

It seemed Jane hadn’t been able to decide which look she wanted, and decided to go for all of them.

The Ziggy Stardust lightning bolt was there, in blue and yellow, running in slightly runny lines down his entire face from right temple to left jaw, with paint trails running down his throat as it hadn’t instantly dried. There was an ornate, incomprehensible symbol that had once been supposed to be something but was now mostly a smear planted in the centre of his forehead. And it was all on a background of swirling red, pink, and orange covering his eyes in a broad band, dripping down his cheekbones.

This was the face of a man who had let a twelve-year-old do his makeup.

It was also the face of a painted statue, the colors very clearly painted and not makeup, not at all anything that even Carlisle would be able to pass off as human. 

Unless he had a gift.

«It’s perfect,» he told her, and he meant it.

Jane beamed.

Another half hour later, and her face was ridiculous as well, though Carlisle was dismayed to find that he hadn’t been able to keep the paint from running all over Jane’s face either. She, too, looked like a twelve-year-old had painted her face.

«Alice,» Jane said with sudden horror. «If she looks for you, she’ll see me like this...»

A laugh slipped out of Carlisle. «I have plenty of blackmail material on Alice after she had a little too much fun in the 2000’s,» he laughed. «I’ll let her burn the egirl album if she agrees to forget any vision she may have about you.»

«Egirl?» Jane frowned.

«As bad as it sounds,» Carlisle told her, even as he was debating the gold sequin pants versus the silver spandex, easily worse than anything Alice had ever worn.

Another twenty minutes later and he’d landed on the pants, combined with a women’s red leather coat that Jane had found god knows where. Jane was happily dressed in hot pink tights, and a checkered coat over the most garishly colored shirt she’d been able to get her hands on. For their eyes they had blue contacts, resulting in an odd, but appropriate violet color.

The long, platinum blonde wig for Jane and the pink one Carlisle had chosen himself made for the perfect finishing touch.

How they had managed to find all of these ridiculous clothing articles, and nothing appropriate for clerical costuming, was beyond Carlisle.

Either way, they both looked insane.

«Any changes to the story?» Carlisle queried, as he adjusted Jane’s wig, tucking strands of hair under it.

Jane hummed. «No… Though we should merge it with our costumes. That we’re looking to get the band back together after converting to Catholicism, but the demand for drug-fuelled acoustic music among American Catholics is really low, so we walk the earth as missionaries searching for disciples.»

Well, this was a huge change to the story, but it was more ludicrous than ever, which was rather the point.

Jane’s eyes widened with excitement. «Or maybe it’s not Catholicism, it’s a new religion. It’s a cult that we at first insist is a huge deal among junkies everywhere, but we quickly make it clear that it’s really just the two of us. And we don’t want gas anymore, we want to convert people to join!»

«I liked the gas, but alright,» Carlisle said, styling Jane’s wig absently.

She nodded thoughtfully. «What are we calling our religion?» She asked.

«Ziggy’s Stardisciples.» Carlisle answered without missing a beat.

She grinned. «Loving it,» she said. Then, looking at the Barnes & Noble bag, she got a thoughtful look on her face. «Give me another ten minutes?» She asked.

It ended up being fifteen minutes, but when Jane was done, Ziggy’s Stardisciples had pamphlets.

Where they had originally said, «JOY TO THE WORLD» in big, friendly letters, the word «Joy» had been striked through by Jane’s pen, replaced by the word «GLAM». Inside Jane had written, in Egyptian hieroglyphs that she had somehow made look girly, «This is a subliminal message».

Carlisle was really quite impressed with the girl’s intellect, that she’d use the phonetic reading of hieroglyphs to form an English sentence like that.

«Try to convince them this is English, and they’re just not as good at reading as they thought,» she explained, handing him five pamphlets.

Like water out of a bucket that’s been turned upside down, Carlisle’s good mood disappeared.

* * *

Choosing a test subject was easier said than done.

Carlisle didn’t think of himself as particularly brave, but still, there were only so many centuries one could live as a vampire before one developed a certain immunity to social awkwardness.

Still, as he and Jane sat on a park bench in their glamorous outfits, overlooking the passing humans and searching for their first test subject, he could not help but wonder how on earth he was going to get his feet to move and actually start explaining his insane story to anybody without spontaneously combusting into a pile of mortified ashes.

On the upside, the more he thought about it the more he was concluding that there was just no way this would work.

It was a desperate hope, but believing in this gift was like believing in Semmelweis’ theory about hygiene. The man had observed, after comparing the mortality rates between the mothers in one hospital and the mothers in another, that the women in the maternity ward next to the morgue died much more often. Semmelweis had theorized that the surgeons needed to clean themselves after handling the dead bodies and before approaching the new mothers, and in doing so invented hand hygiene.

His theory had explained so much, and yet the implication that Carlisle had been carrying disease from one patient to another had been awful. If he could still dream, it would have filled his life with nightmares. 

And so, like much of the medical community, Carlisle had very badly wanted to not believe it, and poked all sorts of holes in that theory.

Of course, Semmelweis turned out to be right, which in turn made Carlisle now wonder if his subconscious was trying to tell him something by bringing up this of all examples. Carlisle had very much thought lobotomies were lunacy, and he’d been right about that. 

More, adopting Semmelweis’ practice had been a nothing to lose, everything to gain kind of situation, so even as Carlisle laughed nervously, and desperately wanted Semmelweis to be wrong, he had still washed his hand with a maniacal fervor after that.

Accepting this gift as being real would bring nothing good at all.

A busy-looking man with his head bent forwards strode past them, and Carlisle decided to go for it.

He jumped up, and ran after the man. «Hey, could I speak to you?» He called.

The man threw a look at Carlisle, and came to an abrupt halt as he took in Carlisle’s ridiculous outfit and makeup. «I don’t have any money,» he said cautiously.

«No, that’s not it!» Carlisle said brightly, moving closer. 

The man frowned, but didn’t step back.

He was older than Carlisle had first thought, about fifty or so. Thin, tall, and with a long face, there was something about the man that seemed intrinsically tired, in the way no amount of sleep could abate. Whatever he did for a living, Carlisle suspected it was stressful.

And now he was being held up by a beautiful clown.

Carlisle fished one of the pamphlets out of his pocket, and handed it to the man, who frowned at the jolly cover. «Have you heard of the Ziggy Stardisciples?» He asked.

The man shook his head. «Can’t say that I have…» he turned the pamphlet around to look at its back, and frowned even more at the Hallmark logo.

«Hallmark is our sponsor,» Carlisle explained. «You can see inside, it’s all explained.»

The man nodded quietly, and opened it. He frowned at Jane’s girly hieroglyphs. «Um,» he said, and gave Carlisle a highly dubious look.

Carlisle gave him a dubious look back. «It says right there who we are,» he said slowly, as if he were questioning the man’s intelligence.

«Right...» the man said, looking disconcerted. «And who is that, exactly?

Deciding not to pursue the pamphlet, Carlisle offered his best smile, showing too many teeth. 

He’d always gone out of his way to have his body language be as unthreatening as possible. Even now, after having known them for years and knowing full well that they trusted him implicitly, he remained considerate around Jacob and his tribe.

But, even as Carlisle actively tried to tone down his usual charm and human-like mannerisms, it didn’t seem to make a difference.

«The Ziggy Stardisciples,» Carlisle told him. «We’re psychedelic musicians who had a glorious epiphany after… well,» he leaned in close, «there was some coke involved. But we had,» he made expressive jazz hands, «an epiphany. That being constantly stoned is the path to piety, and only through the power of channeling the seventies may we worship before the Lord’s altar!»

«How are you saying this with a straight face,» Jane marvelled quietly.

«It’s the existential dread,» Carlisle whispered back quickly, and he wasn’t trying to be funny.

The man was staring at him in utter astonishment. «Are you making this up?» He asked.

Carlisle gave the man a withering look. «I did not come here to this mountain town dressed in my ceremonial robes to be mocked.»

«Sorry…» the man replied awkwardly, looking like he had no idea what else to say.

Carlisle felt awkward for him, but this was definitely discomforting. He looked insane and inhuman, this man should not be humoring his mad ramble. But this was no time to break character. And so, he only shook his head. «My daughter and I have travelled this country far and wide for years searching for someone who’d understand our faith, still nothing.»

«I’m sorry to hear that,» the man told him, and he sounded sincere.

Carlisle put on a brave face, and shrugged. «Yeah, well. What are you gonna do, hm? Apart from drug-fuelled worship, of course,» he grinned, again with too many teeth.

The man didn’t even blink.

«Of course,» he laughed, and clapped Carlisle’s shoulder.

So far as Carlisle could tell, the man definitely thought he was crazy, but he seemed taken with him anyway.

It was inconclusive.

«Ask him for gas money,» Jane whispered.

Carlisle’s smile stiffened.

He leaned in closer, and lowered his voice. «Listen, when you said you didn’t have any money…»

Two minutes later he was sitting next to Jane on that bench with a twenty dollar bill in his hand and a look of despair on his face.

«Six hundred people lived in Jonestown and drank the Kool-Aid. No gifts,» he whispered, his voice oddly hoarse.

Jane frowned slightly, likely not knowing the reference, though she didn’t ask. It was clear enough from context.

«It could be he was just playing along,» Carlisle continued in that same, hoarse tone.

Jane didn’t even dignify that with a comment. «My turn,» she simply said, and danced into the street to run after a teenaged human boy, just slightly older than herself.

«Hey, could I speak to you?» she called after him.

He turned and, like Carlisle’s human, was so surprised by her getup that he halted and had to stare at her in astonishment.

It seemed Jane was now too weird for humans to remember they were supposed to be frightened.

«Uh,» the boy said.

Jane walked closer, and Carlisle had to admire how much care she was taking to mimic his body language. «Have you heard of the Ziggy Stardisciples?» she asked, holding a pamphlet out to the boy.

Something about Jane’s arm moving towards the boy seemed to kick his instincts back into gear, and he took a step back. «No…» he said uncertainly, eyes flickering from side to side.

Jane smiled brightly, though unlike Carlisle she tried to look reassuring. «We’re psychedelic musicians who had a glorious-»

«Sorry, look, um, I… mom’s in labor,» the boy said, snapped Jane’s pamphlet out of her hand, and started jogging away.

Jane turned back to Carlisle and threw her hands up in the air. «His mom’s in labor,» she said.

Carlisle got up and strode right past Jane to intercept the boy.

«Hey, excuse me!» He called after him.

The boy turned, and his eyes widened to see another insane-looking person trying to talk to him.

Carlisle put his hand on Jane’s shoulder, and gave his most friendly smile. «Could your mother wait a few minutes? Jane here wanted to tell you something,» he said.

God, he sounded like he had a van filled with kittens somewhere.

And yet the fear melted off the boy’s face, and he walked back towards them. «My mom’s not actually in labor, uh-» he halted in his step and flushed a scarlet red as he realized just how obvious and rude his excuse had been. He shot a panicked look up at Jane, who even with the paint on her face had to be the prettiest girl he’d ever seen.

«Look, um, I didn’t mean- what’s with the paint?» He asked in a high-pitched, panicked voice, taking another step closer to them.

He didn’t seem afraid anymore.

At this point Carlisle wasn’t even surprised.

Jane, however, was. She gaped at the boy.

«It’s…» She paused for a time that was unremarkable for a human, but to a vampire this was unnaturally long.

Jane was stunned.

«Could I have twenty dollars?» She eventually asked in a thin voice.

Carlisle smiled encouragingly at the boy.

A minute later Jane was twenty dollars richer and very quiet as they walked away from the boy.

«Well,» she said quietly.

Carlisle clapped her shoulder, and strode towards a young woman walking along by herself.

If a young woman out alone would feel perfectly comfortable with a strange man wanting to talk to her about his creepy religion, then-

Well, Carlisle was running out of excuses.

And at this point he knew what was going to happen even as he approached her. He wished to God he was wrong, but…

This woman was going to go along with whatever nonsense he told her.

«Good morrow!» He said, keeping a distance of seven feet. If he was somehow wrong about everything, he’d rather not have actually intimidated an innocent young woman.

Of course, the woman didn’t appear at all intimidated. She only gave him a startled look. «Excuse me?» She asked.

«Fair maiden,» Carlisle said, putting on his best Queen’s Theatre accent. Modern humans had no idea what Shakespeare actually sounded like, so it was better to go with the stereotype. When Bella had talked Carlisle into doing his original accent for her she hadn’t understood a word he’d said, and gone so far as to insist he remembered wrong.

«You’re doing the outdated English?» Jane asked.

«I’m doing the historically incorrect outdated English,» Carlisle corrected quietly.

«‘Ere I saw thee walking,» he continued. The woman’s jaw had fallen. He couldn’t blame her. «I did find myself in need of an apostle. Maiden, hath thou heard tale of the Ziggy Stardisciples?»

«You expect me to mimic you on this?» Jane whispered in quiet horror.

He handed the woman a pamphlet. She accepted. She looked too dazed not to. 

Carlisle felt his spirits rise. 

This was a normal reaction.

She looked normal, too.

Early twenties, open and intelligent eyes, a fashionable but not too expensive jacket coupled with impractical jeans, and a rainbow pin in her hat, she looked every inch the well-educated, reasonable, college student.

With renewed, if fervent, hope, Carlisle continued. «’Twas many fortnights ago that I did wander into a New Jersey crackhouse. Yonder did I have an epiphany, that our Lord would have us all live in the glory of drugs and Shakespeare.»

«So, you’re on a bunch of crack?» The woman asked with an arched eyebrow.

«I’m on a bunch of crack,» Carlisle confirmed matter-of-factly in perfectly modern American.

«Yeah... I can tell,» she told him, giving him a once-over from wig to shiny boots, her eyebrows reaching new heights. «What’s this religion about, anyway?» She then asked, opening the pamphlet to frown at Jane’s hieroglyphs.

Carlisle stared at her.

Was she, too, going to humor him?

«Worshipping the Lord through drugs and outrageous outfits,» he told her, his voice coming out oddly muted. He pulled himself together, and tried to look put out that she’d even ask. «It’s all explained in the pamphlet. That’s French,» he claimed.

She let out a delighted laugh, and put the pamphlet in her purse. «This actually sounds pretty cool. Can I join you guys?»

Carlisle’s knees almost gave out. «Beg thy pardon?» He whispered.

«Can I become a Ziggy… Star?»

«Stardisciple,» he corrected automatically in a hollow voice, no longer able to keep up the act.

This couldn’t be happening.

Was she trying to pull his leg?

She smiled back, oblivious to Carlisle’s inner turmoil, though perhaps a bit awkwardly perhaps since he had gone completely silent and was now just staring at her, unblinking and statue-still. 

She looked quite serious.

«That’s what I meant,» she said. «So, is it just you, or is this a band?»

Carlisle could almost hear that tense, building soundtrack that had accompanied Truman as he realized the world wasn’t real.

It never had been.

«We’re also involved in a pyramid scheme,» he said tonelessly, the world trickling forth from his lips even as his face remained motionless. They sounded like someone far away was saying them, and Carlisle was hearing them from a long distance.

The woman tilted her head, waiting for him to go on.

«How’s thy credit?» he continued, desperation seeping through his voice. 

It was more a plea than a pitch.

More than anything he wanted her to refuse. 

He would have given his every earthly possession to that woman in that instant to have her refuse to join his idiotic pyramid scheme. He would give her eternal life, anything, just to have her refuse to join his pyramid scheme.

But she frowned in contemplation. «It’s pretty good. Can’t I just do the weed and rock thing? Or, hm, maybe. What are we selling?»

He stared at her in horror.

She stared back. «Is it face paint?» She asked, too kindly.

He turned his back on her and made a beeline back to Jane.

«Hey! Where are you going?» He heard her call from behind him.

Jane looked daunted, though it was nothing compared to how Carlisle felt. 

Silently, they went to stand in front of one of the many sports stores that Whitefish had to offer.

«This could still be confirmation bias,» Carlisle whispered, and leaned against the wall. For all the human blood that was in his system, his knees still felt so very weak.

Jane let out a startled laugh. «You’re seriously still in denial?»

Carlisle shook his head quietly. «No,» he whispered, and sank down to sit with his back to the wall.

He tried to remember a time someone had disliked him. A time someone had been disinterested or dismissive, or disrespectful…

Every time he showed up at a new hospital with his too-fresh face, even his most arrogant senior colleagues would hear him out and defer to his judgement when he insisted they were in the wrong. He’d ascribed it to always making his case well, and sounding like he knew what he was talking about.

But even when someone had tried to argue, Carlisle had always ended up getting the last word.

The fact that they even believed he was a man in his mid-thirties, married and with five teenagers…

Just how much of his life was a lie?

He remembered how each of his family members had reacted to him when waking up to their new lives.

Edward had been terrified by his new circumstances, caught in a living nightmare. But he had never feared Carlisle, even in those messy and confused first few seconds he’d trusted that Carlisle meant well.

Esme had been pure delight. The second she opened her eyes to see Carlisle’s face more clearly than she had been able to see it in life, a smile brighter than the sun had set her face ablaze with light. She fully believed she was in heaven, until she felt the thirst.

Rosalie, like Edward, had been horrified. As far as she was concerned, she had been abducted by inhuman demons and forcibly made into one of them. It was another loss of autonomy when she had thought she couldn’t possibly lose any more. If anyone had the right to hate Carlisle, it was Rosalie.

But she never did.

Emmet thought he was God.

Countless more faces flickered before Carlisle’s inner eye.

Zafrina dissolving her illusion after she’d assessed he wasn’t a threat, Alistair’s cautious, yet hopeful approach, Ephraim Black shifting back into human form so they could talk, Tanya’s wide smile as she recognized a kindred spirit…

There was Aro himself, who had seemed excited enough by Carlisle’s unusual eye color, but the moment he touched Carlisle’s hand his entire demeanor had changed. He had gone quiet with something bordering on awe, and when he looked back up at Carlisle his eyes had been wide open, filled with such reverential fondness, a fondness that had made it unthinkable to say no when he offered Carlisle his hospitality.

If Carlisle had been using his gift on even one of these people…

Or on all of them…

The implications were nearly tangible. They felt like coils of viscous, black tar, winding themselves around his heart and creeping up his throat, making him want to vomit.

This was horror in its purest form.

He’d been here before.

When he’d woken up into this new life, and known that he had become Death, danger to everyone around him.

He had gotten past that, gotten so far, and now, centuries later, it appeared he was right back to where he started.

How could he ever tell his family?

If this gift worked the way it seemed to, then no one had been more affected than them. They, more than anybody else, had been hurt by this. Disenfranchised of their free will, their ability to choose, and never even knowing about it.

They wouldn’t believe him, of course. Not at first. Esme would certainly refuse to, no matter the evidence he provided him with, she thought too highly of him for that.

And why did she think so highly of him, exactly?

«Everything okay?» Jane’s voice interrupted his spiraling thoughts. She tapped his arm, and frowned at him, her eyes nearly level with his now that he was sitting.

Carlisle tried to smile down at her, but judging by the way she cringed on his behalf he failed. «This is great,» he told her in an upbeat tone that fooled no one. Jane cringed again, and the look she gave him this time was definitely alarmed.

She was silent for a few seconds as she stared at him, deep in thought.

When she finally spoke, her voice was all too understanding, though mixed in with the awkwardness of someone who doesn’t know what to say but feels they should say something. «I’m sure Aro won’t mind if you come with us to Volterra to see Corin,» she told him, and squeezed his arm lightly.

Eyes wide and caring, her lips drawn up in the smallest of comforting smiles, Jane’s face was the face of every child who has ever had to tell their parents that it’s okay if they get a divorce. 

Carlisle wondered how miserable he had to look to elicit this level of sympathy from Jane, of all people.

He got up and drew her in for a quick, one-armed hug. «Thanks, but I’ll be fine,» he told her. Then, in a lighter tone, he added, «And Corin would be cross with you for getting her stuck with me anyway.»

He forced a laugh, but it was thin and only lasted two «ha»-s.

Jane stared at him in silent alarm.

They might have remained that way, Carlisle staring at nothing at all and Jane looking disturbed, but they had a welcome interruption.

«So this is where you two ran off to!» Aro's voice rang out cheerfully from surprisingly close by.

Carlisle’s head snapped to the right, and he saw Aro and Renata approaching from around a street corner. He also saw their eyes widen with shock as they took in the way Carlisle and Jane were now dressed.

«What did you two  _ do _ ?» Renata asked in shock.

«An experiment to prove Carlisle’s gift,» Jane replied.

Carlisle nodded mutely.

«How did it go?» Renata asked carefully, giving Carlisle a worried look. Aro, too, was frowning at Carlisle.

Carlisle wondered just how miserable he looked, or if it was simply the outfit giving them pause.

After a few seconds, it became clear that he wasn’t going to answer.

«He convinced a woman to join the cult of Ziggy’s Stardisciples, and she was open to doing our pyramid scheme,» Jane said quietly in a tone that belied the ridiculous words she was saying. 

Aro blinked several times, while Renata frowned, as if she hadn’t heard that right. 

«He also got a man to give him twenty dollars for gas so we could go on a glam rock pilgrimage, and I got twenty dollars as well from a third human,» Jane continued.

«I see,» Aro said slowly after a moment’s pause.

«There was more,» Jane added after another few seconds.

«We left you for two hours,» Renata stated dazedly.

Carlisle just laughed again, that same forced listing of «ha»-s that didn’t even try to convince anybody.

«Carlisle…» Aro began, before trailing off. He stared at Carlisle’s painted face, and shook his head. «I can’t believe I’m still attracted to you,» he muttered, more to himself than to any of the vampires present. Then, louder, «Carlisle, as much as I agree with the need to prove your gift, could you not have saved it for a time when you’re not in a small town where you’re being investigated for double homicide?»

Carlisle grinned joylessly. «It’s a bit late for that, I’m afraid, and it had nothing to do with our gift stunt.» 

«We left you for two hours,» Renata said again in that same dull tone.

Aro walked closer, and held out his hand to Carlisle, the request clear.

Carlisle gazed tiredly up at him. «How about you go first,» he said.

«We need to find a river you can jump into,» Aro deadpanned, hand still outstretched, and beckoned impatiently with his fingers.

Carlisle nodded. He hadn’t really expected anything else. He’d hoped Aro would find a better option, but would have been shocked if he did.

There was no direct evidence tying him to the case, but he had singled himself out as a person of interest to the detectives. They would want to investigate him.

And Doctor Carlisle Cullen would not hold up to federal scrutiny.

Gift or not, the cops Carlisle came into contact with would still be reporting to other humans. If they started saying that Carlisle was the most innocent flower that ever did bloom, questions would be asked.

This was not an ideal ending at all, they would search his home and belongings for hair and skin samples to get his DNA only to find that he’d lived like a man wrapped in cellophane all his life, and his family would have to act their hearts out as well.

However, while the feds would want to know how Carlisle had killed those people, a cold case with no one to prosecute would not be given priority. 

The agents would be reassigned.

But there was one loose thread.

«I’m afraid Jane will have to jump too,» Carlisle said.

Aro blinked in shock. «What? Why?» He whirled towards Jane, a quizzical look on his face.

Jane bit her lip, and looked up at Carlisle.

Carlisle raised an eyebrow back at her.  _ You’re on your own. _

Jane’s eyes narrowed into a brief glare, and she pursed her lips.

«Well?» Aro demanded impatiently.

«I said I was his daughter,» Jane muttered.

Renata’s jaw fell in shock. «What?» she gasped.

«Why?» Aro asked quietly.

«I thought it would be funny?» she muttered in a thin voice.

Carlisle took pity on her, and put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. She shot a grateful look up at him.

Aro, too, seemed to soften, however marginally. Carlisle removed his hand from Jane, as if she’d burned him.

Had he used his gift to help her out with Aro just now?

«There’s also the fact that considering my family’s cover story… oh, I’ll show you,» he said, and put Aro’s hand in his own.

Aro’s eyes widened comically as he took in the afternoon Carlisle had had, complete with the realization that he had unintentionally made Esme look like a pimp.

«Well then,» he finally said, and Carlisle let his hand fall.

«Well then,» he repeated.

A snicker escaped.

Carlisle’s eyes widened. «You’re  _ laughing _ ?» He whispered.

His life had fallen apart, he no longer understood the world nor his place in it, and Aro, who knew all of this and understood in a way no one else ever could, was  _ laughing _ ?

Aro covered his mouth with his hand, trying to hide his grin, but the effort to keep from laughing seemed to only be making it harder. «Carlisle, given that backstory you sound like a former child prostitute,» he wheezed, as his shoulders started shaking with barely contained laughter.

«Wait, I’m lost. Child prostitute?» Jane asked.

«Oh,  _ you’re _ lost?» Renata asked dully.

«My backstory is that I came from poverty and married a wealthy older woman, if I was sexually active at fourteen people are going to ask questions,» Carlisle explained quickly, but that only seemed to give Renata more questions.

«Why would you make that your backstory? Of all-»

«It was Bella’s idea, not mine,» Carlisle told her.

Aro, meanwhile, was losing his battle against laughing, as giggles kept trickling forth behind his hand.

«None of this is funny, Aro!» Carlisle hissed.

«Carlisle, over the course of less than twenty-four hours you’ve gone from being a reputable doctor with a perfect family to an axe murdering prostitute with scorned bastards running around. It’s funny,» he giggled breathlessly.

Carlisle wished he could correct Aro on that, but the man was not wrong.

He deflated. «And tomorrow I’ll be a dead whore with an existential crisis.»

Aro sobered instantly. «Carlisle, your gift is a good thing.»

Carlisle guffawed. «I’ve been brainwashing my loved ones, Aro, if that’s your idea of a good thing-»

«You haven’t brainwashed anybody!» Aro insisted, but Carlisle only shook his head.

«Let’s just figure out how Jane and I both drown tomorrow.»

«I fall into the river, and you heroically dive in after me?» Jane piped up.

«We’ve figured out how you and Jane both drown tomorrow,» Aro said.

Carlisle turned it over in his head for a hundredth of a second. «Works for me,» he said.

Jane smiled, looking slightly pleased with herself.

«Cullen?!»

All four vampires turned to see three of his colleagues, Drs. Brewer, Milton, and Graham staring at Carlisle.

Just how small was Whitefish?

«Hi,» he said.

There was really nothing else to say.

«Hi,» Dr. Milton echoed back, staring first at Carlisle, then at Jane. Then at Aro and Renata, and back to Jane. Finally, she looked back at Carlisle.

«This is my daughter,» Carlisle said quietly, inclining his head towards Jane who, in her ridiculous outfit that matched his, looked more like his mini-me than ever.

«Hi,» Jane muttered.

«I see,» Dr. Milton said quietly, her face pale.

Drs. Graham and Brewer were both staring at Carlisle like he was a wild animal, ready to spring and attack at any time.

Nobody said anything for several long seconds.

«There you guys are!»

No.

_ No. _

«No,» Jane whispered, loud enough for the humans to hear.

«Kópros!» Aro hissed quietly.

Alec’s youthful, lovely face appeared from the crowd, and he ran up to Jane, grabbing her hand and smiling brightly, even as she stared at him in dull horror.

They could not have more clearly been brother and sister.

Carlisle looked slowly up to meet Dr. Milton’s eyes.

«Cullen… what the fuck is this?»

«Alec, you idiot. You idiot!» Jane hissed, inaudibly to the humans.

«Why, what did I do?» Alec whispered back, looking utterly lost and slightly frightened by his sister’s behavior.

«Just act natural, Alec,» Renata told him quickly, her lips barely moving.

Carlisle sighed, and gestured towards Alec with his hand. «This is my son, Alec,» he deadpanned monotonously.

Alec, to his credit, kept his cool. «What is  _ happening _ ?» He whispered to the vampires present, not letting his lips move so the humans could see. His eyes widened as he appeared to finally notice how his sister was dressed. «What is this?» He whispered again.

Aro sighed. «You’re going to have to jump into a river, Alec,» he told him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, but that's what happens when writing tumblrs are started and I get eaten up.
> 
> Thanks as usual to our glorious The Carnivorous Muffin, scourge of bad writing everywhere.
> 
> I recently rewatched the three first movies, and my god, I had forgotten just how different they were from the books. I know this fic is already tagged «canon - books», but still, after seeing what those movies did I must reiterate - the canon in the films does not apply to this fic. At all.
> 
> Other notes: I have never been to Whitefish, and took major liberties with the descriptions of the town.
> 
> In case people think I’m exaggerating how scary vampires are to most people: in Midnight Sun Edward spends no small amount of time marvelling that the humans aren’t running away in terror as they usually do. It appears to be such a common fixture in his life that when he has Bella by his side and the humans relax a bit, he goes «WHAT IS THIS». Just… Carlisle should not be able to work as a doctor.
> 
> Unless, of course, he has a gift.
> 
> Kópros = a not-too-filthy Greek word for «shit» used in the Odyssey, which dates back to the Mycenean age. While the Odyssey was transmitted orally and it so stands to reason that the swears would have been updated, making this ancient Greek but not Mycenean Greek, it’s the closest to perfect I could find for Aro.


End file.
